


What Love Looks Like

by adi_rotynd



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Angst, Camille Belcourt Being An Asshole, Domestic Fluff, Fantastic Racism, Fluff and Humor, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Magnus Bane Deserves Nice Things, Magnus Bane Gets Nice Things, Magnus Bane-centric, Past Abuse, at least he gets a family which is only dubiously quote nice unquote, everyone loves Magnus Bane, occasionally they show it ineptly, so we're really running the full gamut here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-31
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:48:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 24,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24465217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adi_rotynd/pseuds/adi_rotynd
Summary: Magnus may have underestimated how seriously the Lightwoods take the premiseyou marry the whole family.
Relationships: Magnus Bane & Isabelle Lightwood, Magnus Bane & Jace Wayland, Magnus Bane & Max Lightwood, Magnus Bane & Simon Lewis, Magnus Bane/Alec Lightwood, Magnus Bane/Camille Belcourt (past)
Comments: 86
Kudos: 334





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A great big box of gratitude to [matchsticks_p](https://archiveofourown.org/users/matchsticks/pseuds/matchsticks_p) for inspiration, support, and a headlong tumble into Magnus Bane fandom. Also, for the title. 
> 
> A few quick continuity notes: 
> 
> 1) I'm more of a TV show fan, but I have pulled some random stuff from the _Bane Chronicles_ just because I prefer it to making up side stories that come up in casual conversation. And Chairman Meow because it's a fantastic name for a cat. 
> 
> 2) This takes place in a nebulous post-wedding pre-Alicante time period and posits that they took care of that little issue with Clary's memory pretty much the day after it happened, and Magnus got re-instated as High Warlock of Brooklyn because I say so. 
> 
> I have a draft of this complete, but I'm still editing, so I'll update on weekends!

_Ah, it's what love looks like, in a world of reproach..._  
"What Blue"  
The Tragically Hip

* * *

Magnus answers a knock at his door one February day, and his sister-in-law presents him with a single red rose. “You have to be my Valentine,” she informs him, and stomps into his loft.

He respects that kind of entrance, and Isabelle’s stomp is a formidable threat to his hardwood floors, so his first instinct is to agree. Still: “As much as it would pain me to turn down such a tempting offer from the loveliest woman I know, my husband might object.” He does, only human-shaped being that he is, appreciate the rose. A Lincoln, if he’s not mistaken. He doesn’t have to lift it any closer to enjoy its perfume, which fills the apartment as rapidly as Izzy’s presence.

“Why would Alec object?” She flings herself onto the couch in a flutter of silk. The flutter is all in her sleeves, as nothing else about her dress has material to waste on extraneous movement. “Jace hasn’t asked you—and Alec can’t guard you for him, that’s cheating.” She leans forward, clasping her hands together. “You can’t score Max, Alec already asked him, and Clary’s being weird. Please say yes, you know you’ll have the most fun with me. Who else are you going to take?” It’s less a rhetorical question than an incipient threat. Magnus is briefly concerned for the safety of her hypothetical rival.

As if in response, or as if to save Magnus from the evidently embarrassingly passé answer that he’d assumed prior claim on the man he married, Chairman Meow thuds a weighty side against the balcony door and lets out the shriek with which he demands food.

“Excuse me one moment.” Magnus dashes over. “My obligations as host are in direct conflict, this is a disaster. Would you mind continuing our conversation in the kitchen?”

“Anything for the Chairman.” Izzy leaps to her feet and, hope blooming as it eternally does, reaches down as she passes the cat. He forges on, high-stepping, belly a-swing, and roundly ignores her. “Why does he like Jace and not me? Jace hates him!”

Magnus gives her a boost in her hop to take a seat on the counter, and laughs when she swings their hands up and uses her grip to spin him. “Cats don’t like to feel observed unless they specifically request attention.” He completes his pirouette at the cupboard and pulls down a glass to house the rose temporarily, and a bowl for the tuna he’s set by for his esteemed visitor. “Jace ignores them, and it reads as very polite. He’s a real gentleman in feline society.”

“Well, he had to manage it somewhere.”

“While I’m offering my guests refreshment, can I get you anything, Isabelle?”

She examines him, eyes dark, long legs swinging. He’s spent this visit unremittingly confused, but this is the first time he can’t read her expression. “Why don’t you admit he’s yours?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The Chairman. Well, most of the balcony cats, but especially him. He eats here twice a day, and Alec says he’s slept inside all winter. But you talk about him like he’s dropping by.”

Magnus turns back to the cupboard and pulls out a cutting board. He’s never known Isabelle to turn down food once it’s in front of her, and he has some fine cheeses he’s been wanting to try. “Oh, I… I suppose I’m trying to be polite, too. He had a collar on the first time he showed up here, did you know that?”

“No, really?” She’s eyeing the cat, doubtful, when he looks her way. The Chairman’s neck does look awfully mighty to be contained.

“It wasn’t the kind that snaps off if it gets caught, and I was worried, given all the twelve-story climbing he evidently does.” He has a pearl-handled cheese knife somewhere, he’s sure he does. He digs into the back of the silverware drawer. “I went downstairs to the address on the tags to see if I couldn’t offer them something a bit more up-to-date and fashion forward.”

“So they left him without one?”

“No. No, they’d just left him.” Still nothing. He snaps his fingers and, call and response, the knife appears. Using magic is something like whistling in a cathedral; a note and an eager echo from a world crafted for just that purpose. It’s still a cold burst of relief to get a response, sometimes, at odd moments, after that bout of leaden solitary silence. “They’d moved away months ago.”

“That’s awful.” She’s indignant, the way she and Alexander are about strange small things. They grew up accustomed to huge losses, to strict rules. Little gray shouldn’t-but-can violations strike them fresh. “Did you track them down? How do the mundane authorities deal with that?”

Magnus laughs again, dry enough to scrape his throat this time. “They don’t, and I didn’t. There wouldn’t be much point forcing them to take a cat they abandoned once. At any rate, that’s why I don’t call the cats mine. They trust a truce, not an all-out alliance. They’ve been someone’s before, and they know perfectly well they’re an opt-in, opt-out experience.”

When he turns, Izzy’s standing, a silent descent even in heels. “Magnus,” she says. “Simon and I were talking recently—”

“Excellent! Speaking of Valentine’s Day.” He twirls the rose in its glass of water.

Her expression was awfully grave, he realizes when she softens into confusion. “What about it?” And broadens into cheer. “You’ll be mine?”

Magnus, who hasn’t gotten this far in life by admitting it when he’s at a complete loss, nevertheless tries, “What about Simon?”

“Fine, I guess you could go with Simon. Or Jace. But neither of _them_ got you a rose.” She toys with her necklace, some little red gem, and her mouth pulls to one side. “Simon and I, actually, we were talking about—he was telling me some stuff about Camille—”

Magnus rocks the knife backward on its point. “What an absolutely terrible conversational topic for him to choose. No wonder you’re not at his door with a rose.”

She blinks, brow furrowing, and pauses.

He wants to ask her to stay to dinner, and to see if he can continue to sidestep an admission that he has no common ground with her understanding of Valentine’s Day but still get her to explain it to him. Suddenly, more than that, he wants her to take every mention of Camille out the door with her before Alexander gets back. He says, “Of course we’ll be Valentines, Isabelle. Nothing would give me more pleasure.”

* * *

It’s nothing—it really is nothing, and if even if it weren't, he knows Isabelle doesn't mean anything by it. She probably wants him to step in and talk to Simon about Camille again, and he can do that. Later. Some other day. If he agrees abruptly, and if giving her her own way makes it easier to dismiss her with a kiss on the cheek and a promise to call, and if he prefers to get rid of her in order to be alone while he makes himself a few drinks, that’s a separate issue.

Once he’s tried several of the breathing techniques Cat swears by, and several of the martinis Maia swears by, his critical thinking kicks back in. He picks up his phone and opens a thread with Simon and Clary, the most pop-culturally aware of his social circle, and says, _Do an old man a favor and describe the nature & purpose of Valentine’s Day._ It’s not impossible that he’s out of touch with current thinking; he doesn’t rank the shifting implications of minor holidays as vital to memorize with each new country and decade.

 _Oh my gosh, are they doing this to you too??_ Clary texts back instantly, and then Simon: _Izzy’s gaslighting me_

Magnus’s phone buzzes again, this time with the opening salvo in an entirely new thread. Jace’s message is addressed to the three of them: _All of you shut the fuck up._

Magnus, who hasn’t been told to shut the fuck up in something like three centuries, stares at his phone. The novelty renders him initially unsure whether he’s offended. He considers the source. Yes, he decides.

 _Where are you?_ He’s already poised to pluck apart a few strands of reality and slip through.

 _Hey bring the jacket I left at your place,_ Jace responds, but Clary more helpfully adds that they’re at Simon’s.

Magnus does not bring Jace’s jacket when he portals through. He does let the portal collapse with a bit more dramatic flair than usual, so that when Jace blinks the light show clear Magnus’s phone is already near his face. He twitches it, wordless, and lets Jace reread his own words. “Oh,” Jace says, to his credit. “Sure, okay.” Which, for Jace, approaches an apology. “You can’t turn me into a frog or whatever. Alec would be disappointed at you for ten hours straight, and he doesn’t even stop to breathe once he gets a good lecture going.”

“You’re right,” Magnus concedes. “I’ll just show Alexander the text, shall I?”

Jace’s jaw clicks.

“Ten hours, was it? I’m immortal, Jace. I have ten hours to burn. How about you?”

“Hey, so I’m not morally opposed—like, fantastic revenge plot concept, I’d see this film in theaters, and actually if you could execute it in front of me so I can pretend it’s my honor Alec is defending, I’ll probably get tingles—but can we _first_ discuss why it is my girlfriend suddenly has a burning desire to wreck the nearest home rather than just let me take her out on Valentine’s Day?”

“Sudden flare-up of self-respect?” Jace suggests. But under the plaster-thick smarminess Magnus detects a hint of panic. And Jace, he’s a bit chagrined to find he knows, only panics under the specific atomic weight of…

“Jace,” Clary sighs. “What did you do?”

Guilt.

“All right.” Jace is also prone to collapsing in every other way imaginable under the specific atomic weight of Clary’s attention. “I might’ve—misunderstood some things. And misrepresented a couple of other things. It was _boring_ there! Not just for me, Izzy was going nuts, and Alec only didn’t know enough to admit he was bored.”

“Going nuts where now?”

“Growing up in the Institute.” Clary sounds entirely too sympathetic, and her rolled eyes are undermined by the fond twist of her lips. “Oh my god, you decided Valentine’s Day was a family holiday because you wanted presents?”

“I _wanted_ to get out of the damn building,” Jace corrects. “And, you know. I wanted them to get out. The hearts and candy looked dumb, I thought they were for kids. I translated creatively.”

“The woman I love is planning a hot weekend getaway with another man because you used Hallmark as an emotional lever to pressure Alec into letting you play hooky from fight club class?” Simon sounds a bit shrill.

Magnus, whose feelings have softened in the wake of _I wanted them to get out_ , finds he’s not uninterested. “A weekend getaway where?”

“Oh no.” Simon points at him, and then at Jace, and then gets both hands involved so as to ward them off simultaneously. “No no. You’re not going on a hot weekend getaway with Izzy without me. And if you are, I’m not telling you where, because she’ll kill me for ruining the surprise. Ruining more of the surprise. Damn it. But there’s no surprise because Jace is going to admit to her—”

Jace, stonefaced, shakes his head. “No way. I got Alec three years running. Bad years. Fifteen to seventeen. I’m not telling him those were technically actual dates, he’d curl up and die. Like spraying holy water on a vampire. Valentine’s Day is a family holiday for the Lightwoods, and it’s staying a family holiday for the Lightwoods if I have to stake you to make that happen.”

“Aww.” Clary’s smile is half sympathetic pout. “That’s actually kind of sweet.”

“It’s not! It’s… it’s a threat, it’s a legally actionable... “ Simon closes his eyes. “I lost this three minutes ago, huh.”

“I think it would be lovely if you came along with Isabelle and I on our Parisian weekend,” Magnus says generously.

“Nice try! I’m not saying nor have I ever said Paris!”

“Of course you didn’t. Venetian, I misspoke.”

Simon makes a sound Magnus is too kind-hearted to describe, at least aloud, as a shriek, and covers his face with his hands. “I’m taking this straight to the Clave, it’s an act of aggression. All of—this is a shadowhunter-warlock alliance against the vampires and I’m pressing charges.”

Clary sighs. “I guess this is my diplomatic mess to solve.”

Jace shrugs. “I mean this supportively, but yeah, he’s sure not my problem.”

She jabs him in the ribs. “I meant because if you’re seriously spending Valentine’s Day with your mom, and Izzy already got Magnus, guess who I get.” She sidles away and locks both arms around Simon’s waist.

Jace’s face folds in on itself with displeasure. “No—”

“I think it’s very sexy how secure you are about this whole mess, especially since it’s completely your fault.”

“Hey, no,” Simon echoes, squirming in Clary’s grip. “I mean, yeah, cool, it’s just, I don't want my very hot superpowered girlfriend to murder me when this ridiculously fragile ruse falls apart.”

Clary leans backward, doing her best to lift him off his feet. “She’ll be fine with it. We’re parabatai, we share everything now.”

Magnus is reasonably sure the sultry tone she’s dropped into is a joke, but he’s entirely sure he wants to preserve that delightful mystery for the rest of his life. “I feel much better about this entire situation,” he announces. “ _And_ I suppose I have a head start on anniversary gifts for Alexander, if I can’t use them this month.”

“Fuck,” says Jace, at everything and everyone.

“Shit, wait, Magnus,” Simon says, shaking himself from the stupor Clary’s induced. “I have to… can we talk about something—”

Magnus opens a portal and backs toward it, distracted by the opportunity for the last word Jace has presented him with. “Of course, darling. Call me anytime. Incidentally, Jace, have you explained to Lucian that he’s forbidden to give your mother so much as a box of chocolates?”

“ _Fuck,_ ” Jace repeats. “Hang on, let me come with you. I want that jacket.”

Magnus does feel better about the situation, and he does appreciate Jace’s feelings, both initial and current. But the fact remains that Jace is the one cheating him out of Valentine’s Day with Alexander. “Then walk.”

* * *

This backfires, as things usually do where Jace is involved. It’s a half-hour walk. By the time he knocks, Alexander is serving the takeout he grabbed on the way home.

“Just here for my jacket,” Jace says, instead of anything like a civilized greeting. At least he doesn’t push by Magnus on his way in as he would have if Alec opened the door.

“Okay. There’s extra, though,” Alec calls out from the kitchen.

Magnus makes a face, but stands aside. “And your bed’s made up.” It’s not, actually, but he snaps his fingers as circumspectly as possible behind the door and a few seconds later it is.

“I don’t want to impose.” Jace doesn’t read that off his hand, but it might have been preferable if he had. The strain of rote memorization is visible.

“Don’t injure yourself. Clary can come over too.” Magnus hauls him in by the elbow as an act of mercy, and hopefully positive reinforcement for trying out one single common courtesy. “Make yourself at home. And by that I do mean take off your boots, they’re disgusting.” He leaves Jace to that task and takes a moment to admire the sight of Alexander in the kitchen—admittedly, laboring over a variety of cardboard containers rather than a simmering pot, but that’s a safer bet in terms of the edibility of the result. He’s learning, but Magnus is up against a lifetime of cafeteria food.

Alec looks up from his intense plating exercise—he has to put all that excess concern somewhere, and if he doesn’t cook he tends to shift it to presentation—and his face clears. The frown of concentration evaporates as his smile surfaces, the very specific smile of sheer delight at Magnus’s presence, the one that still hits Magnus in the chest every time. “Sorry,” he says, and he waves a dish cloth at the living room. “I guess I don’t believe they eat if I don’t see it happen.” He tugs Magnus closer by the hand and presses a kiss to his knuckles, an absent-mindedly courtly gesture that makes it very inconvenient for Jace to be here right now.

“I love that about you,” Magnus says, which is true. Also, they don’t have soundproof walls in the structural sense, but he can and will arrange something magically for later on. Aside from his designs on Alec’s virtue, he will not wake up at 3 a.m. to hear Jace and Clary giggling in that unsettling fashion ever again. “Alexander.”

“Mm-hm?” He keeps Magnus’s hand but has gone back to fretting over the equal distribution of a variety of pakoras.

“What are you doing on Valentine’s Day?”

Jace takes the doorway now, arms crossed and doing his best to loom in stocking feet. He always looks as though he’d prefer to be looming, though, so his behavior doesn’t register with Alec.

“Taking Max to Alicante, why?” Alexander is a poor dissembler. He really finds nothing unusual about that decision. _All right,_ Magnus decides, _not a practical joke._ Alec’s head does jerk up when Magnus doesn’t answer and Jace keeps looming and looking put-upon. “Wait, really, why? Jace, Mom is your job this year, do _not_ try to ruin Izzy’s—”

“I’m not! I’ve got Maryse, I’m not trying to steal Magnus from Izzy!” Jace throws his hands up and retreats to the living room.

Magnus slides his hands around Alec’s waist. “Don’t try to ruin Izzy’s…?”

“No use. She wouldn’t tell me where she wants to take you. She said she couldn’t trust me to keep a secret under pressure.”

Magnus continues to slide his hands, and to exert pressure. “That may have been wise of her.”

“ _Mag_ nus—”

“Alex _and_ er.” But he kisses his cheek and retreats to set the table. He very nearly keels over when he finds Jace in the middle of doing it.

“Ioweyouone,” Jace says, apparently addressing a linen napkin.

Magnus’s mood sprouts wings and soars. “Why, so you do.”

“What if we make it two?”

“Oh, we’re well above two, not that I’m keeping a precise tally in my extensive records. What did you have in mind?” he asks instantly, if with healthy trepidation. If he extracts the request before Alexander comes in, he has twice the odds of successfully turning it down.

Jace lines up knives and spoons with the kind of concentration to which Alec is treating the pakora. Unnatural, in this case; the last time Jace set a table Magnus distinctly remembers sitting down to a bundle of utensils rolled in their napkins as if for a quick getaway. “Clary’s spending a couple of weeks in Alicante. Training, classes she missed growing up mundane…”

“I’m aware.” He narrows his eyes. “No, I will not portal you there every single evening and portal you back in the morning. I can’t be exposed to that kind of proximity to your sex lives, my sensibilities are too delicate when it comes to my sweet Biscuit. Yes, you may stay here with Alexander and me while she’s gone, but only if you refrain from sulking in shared living spaces.”

“No, I want—” Jace, who soured visibly with each of Magnus’s preemptive strikes, sinks into the nearest chair and a sort of earnest fugue that reminds Magnus too much of Alexander for comfort. “By the time she gets back I want to have an apartment ready for her. Outside the Institute.” He flips the nearest table knife over and back, a clear and present danger to Magnus’s glassware. “The other night we got caught sneaking back in after curfew and she said the next time someone treated her like a teenager she was going to scream.”

“I hesitate to ask, but what was your response?”

He’s all low-browed misery. “We didn’t even get in trouble, I had a great cover story ready. But when I pointed _that_ out she actually did scream and then she wouldn’t let me in her room.” He shrugs. “Look, I don’t get it. But it’s working for you and Alec, right? You got him an apartment and you guys are the happiest couple I know.”

Magnus considers his fingernails, which are flecked with gold, and then the ceiling, which isn’t, but could be. “Oh, I don’t know about that…”

Jace glowers. The expression very nearly manifests as a separate entity, floating free of his face, a miniature and ghastly haunting. “No,” he grinds out, “you really are. Because you’re a perfect husband and Alec couldn’t be luckier.”

“Due to my extraordinary good looks and personal charm, or did you have anything else in mind?”

“Looks, charm, emotional maturity.”

Alexander enters with the first two plates and, on hearing this, a deeply suspicious expression. “Who’s emotionally mature?”

“Me,” Magnus announces, pleased. He has elected to take that comment in the spirit in which he deserves it, rather than that in which it was intended. “Darling, Jace was just paying me the most touching string of compliments.”

“Oh.” Alec puts one plate in front of Jace, and then spends an insulting amount of time strategizing where to put Magnus’s so as to maximize the distance between them. “Why?”

“I’m taking him apartment-hunting. He was expressing his abject gratitude. I’m sure I can look forward to more of it in the future.”

“All right.” Alec hovers between them.

Magnus swivels on his heel and drops into the chair Alec’s assigned him. “Starting with his not murdering me while you get your own food, we’re not toddlers.”

“Okay. Good. Yeah.” Alec, still bent close to Magnus, makes minute adjustments to the location of his plate. “Are you trying to murder him?”

Magnus is too busy looking artfully shocked and aggrieved to particularly wonder whence the accusation. Jace, genuinely shocked and aggrieved, doesn’t need to wonder. “ _Come on_ , Alec, I’m not going to die without the Institute babysitting me! What the hell!”

“That’s not what I said. I’m just wondering where you got the idea.”

“Don’t be silly, Alexander, where does he get all his more outrageous ideas? And who makes sure they all turn out splendidly?”

“Clary.” Alec’s tone suggests he disagrees with Magnus’s assessment of how these ideas turn out.

“Well, potential apocalypses aside, you have to admit that he won’t die with Clary there. She’s a bright and competent young woman. You only need one person capable of working a microwave oven and locating a laundromat.”

“You two,” Jace says poisonously, “couldn’t be more perfect for one another.”

Magnus hooks an arm around Alexander’s neck and kisses his cheek. “I’ve often thought so.”

* * *

Isabelle takes him dancing. In Rio de Janeiro. So, to begin with, he’s in love.

He hasn’t spent an entire night clubbing in—technically, something like two years, but it feels like decades. He and Izzy have carved out time on a few occasions, but with all the emergencies and increased responsibilities, and with neither of their menfolk particularly enthused to go along, it rarely lasts as long as they’d like. It’s something else entirely to dance and drink with a city on his arm and no end in sight, until he’s pleasantly, tinglingly numb and the music more than his own volition is moving his limbs.

They race back to the hotel with dawn on their heels, and Magnus’s head is light, ringing and spinning. As he opens the door Izzy giggles between his shoulder blades to muffle the sound, arms around his waist as he wrestles with the key. Once they’re inside she twists the lock and, even tipsy, reaches into her boot for stele to finish it off with a rune.

“Oh, no need, my dear.” He straightens her up. “Allow me.”

She mumbles something, sways, and disappears into the bathroom before he can thank her. He imagines gratitude will make more of an impression in the morning anyway. Or afternoon. He also unlocks and relocks the door, and settles it with a quick warding spell. He frowns at the door, vaguely annoyed with himself, but it’s only a very small backslide, and anyway he’s had too much rum for it to count.

He tumbles onto his bed the wrong way and twirls a hand to swap his clothes for pajamas without sitting up, so casually he’s lucky he doesn’t end up with a silk sleeve embedded in his arm. The arm would be salvageable; the silk, never.

“Magnus.” Izzy’s giggling still, and stage-whispering. “I have to tell you something.” She pounces on the bed behind him and grabs the comforter, rolling herself in it until she’s bundled at his back.

“What’s that?” He pushes an elbow into the mattress, about to turn and face her.

She digs an arm free and puts it over him, holding him still. “No, you can’t look at me. I needed five caipirinhas and the cover of darkness. Remember when we met?”

“Vividly. It was an eventful day, and you were one of the headlines.”

“Do you know who you would have seen? If that demon had made it to you, whose memory it would have taken?”

Her breath smells like sugar and rum, a warm rush of it at the back of his neck. She’s pressed close, but he can’t really feel the ruby beating cold between his shoulder blades. He just thinks he can. Everything is comfortably blurred, but even from here he can see the sharp edges approaching. “Yes.”

“What if it asked again? Now?”

“Isabelle…” He twists. “You have the caipirinhas and the darkness, I’d like an outline of my conversational partner.”

“Fine.” She releases her grip and sits in a jolt of movement, unwinding the comforter and throwing it over their heads. “There. A fortress. Alec used to do this for me when we were little. You can tell me anything in here.”

Magnus curls his legs in, sitting roughly facing her, although it’s hard to be sure. Less any activated runes, he can see better than she can, but that isn’t saying much at the moment. “Izzy, you know how much I love your brother, don’t you?” He tries not to say it, but: “Anyway, that’s not how Valak worked. He wouldn’t ask for the same price—”

Even blind, she lands a punch on his arm with pinpoint accuracy. This is the problem with marrying into a family of obsessively trained derring-do types. “Nerd! You’re as bad as Alec. Of course I know you love him, that’s not what I’m asking!” She finds his hand in the dark and squeezes. “Dad—our dad says—which I guess is ironic, because he did opt out of everyone but Max, anyway, he says you can’t choose your family, but you… Magnus, we got lucky with you. We know that. If you ever—if you need help—”

“My dear,” he folds her hand against his chest, “I’m going to suggest that five caipirinhas may have been what you needed, but perhaps the mojitos you followed it with were not.”

“You might be right.” She slumps forward with a groan, resting her forehead on his shoulder. The necklace slides forward, knocking against his chest. It was his Valentine’s gift to her, a new ruby in the old setting and chain. It had been a roaring success; she’d teared up, and only one caipirinha in.

“So?” she says. “Who would it have been?”

“Who would… who have been?” He bats the comforter out of his face and combs his fingers through her hair. It’s a thick unruly tumble, waves springing loose toward curls. He expected it to feel different for a second, expected silk and the scent of lotuses.

“If Valak got to you, when we met.”

“Fortunately for a great many people, I don’t kiss and tell.”

“Camille?” She says it simply, with none of the venom or incredulity he’d expect, given Izzy’s temperament and experience of Camille. He still doesn’t respond.

“Magnus, do you ever talk to Alec about her?”

“Astonishingly, my dalliance with a convicted murderer isn’t my first choice, on the multitude of occasions on which I regale Alexander with all the intimate details of my previous relationships, no.”

“I think you should.”

“Well, I’ll certainly put it on my to-do list, then.”

“I don’t know who I’d see, now.”

“We’re back to Valak?”

“Mm-hm.” She sounds like she’ll fall asleep any moment, all her weight on him, and her trust is so thoughtless he can almost take for granted. “I love Alec just as much as I did then, but it’s… wasn’t it a stupid deal? _One_ person you love _most_? I’m not jealous of Jace all the time, I have Simon and Clary. There’s you.” She squeezes his hand. “I love you, Magnus Lightwood-Bane.” Her syllables have been smudging together, but this is remarkably clear, with none of the labored over-enunciation of the very drunk.

“I love you too, Isabelle Lightwood.” It’s easy to say, the kind of truth heavy enough to fall out unbidden. And it’s easy to do, since Alec cracked him open all over again. _Clary and Izzy, Jace and Simon._ Every name is a knot in a net winding tighter. It had been enough just to love Alec, to brace for Alec’s loss.

“You should tell him,” she says. “Something about how you were together, you and Camille. Give him a memory.” She shifts her hand, moves her fingers over and laces them through his again. “Or me. You could give me one.”

The request knocks a specific memory loose, though he doesn’t plan on complying. Talking about Camille is a losing proposition almost on par with talking to Camille. The habit lurches along, though: sooner or later, in a conversation about Camille, he’ll have to defend her, and he reaches for a good memory.

 _“You can always come home to me,”_ Camille told him once. _“You always will. And I’ll take you. All you have to do is not give me a reason to turn you away.”_ Her expression was perfectly composed, sketched out beforehand and filled out with living color at the eyes and lips. It had been one of their earlier breakups, and Magnus hadn’t believed her. He hadn’t believed he’d come back, and he hadn’t believed that she wasn’t just as angry with him as he was with her.

She’d told the perfect truth. It hadn’t been a romantic declaration, but she had meant it. For a hundred years, there was somewhere for him to go.

Izzy grows ever-heavier in his arms, the longer he’s silent. He meant to at least throw out something about Camille’s vast and shockingly ill-kept collection of shoes, or her subpar habits as a pet owner. He should never have let her keep that snake.

“I don’t think…” Izzy huffs. “I had too many mojitos. Remind me to try to say this again tomorrow.”

“All right.”

She slips sideways and curls up against him. “Promise not to be mad at Simon.”

“I’m never mad at Simon,” he hazards.

(They will both wake up monumentally hungover, and Magnus will be entirely too miserable to voluntarily bring up Camille. He’s not going to remind Isabelle of any part of this.)


	2. Chapter 2

Magnus booked a full day of apartment-viewing with Jace in a mood less altruistic than gleeful. As he saw it at the time, this equation balanced out entirely in his favor. It’s a sacrifice of his scant free hours, and entails spending an awful lot of those hours with Jace in a one-on-one capacity. However, he gets to window-shop for expensive, ridiculous apartments, and it’s made Alexander glowingly grateful in a variety of fun and interesting ways. And—a deciding factor—it’s all in fun.

“Max, I swear on Raziel’s wings, if you don’t close that book while you walk, I’m letting you step into the next elevator shaft.”

“You couldn’t stop me anyway, with one arm.”

Magnus, who’s known for a week which apartment he’s going to insist on, arranged the bulk of the day purely for his own light entertainment—only to find himself outmaneuvered by Lightwood family drama.

“My arm’s just fine and I’ll prove it, pipsqueak—”

“Incorrigible,” Magnus informs the real estate agent. “Both of them. What were you saying about the swimming pool?”

Jace, in a move the effects if not the methods of which Magnus should have foreseen, has upended his plans. First, by patrolling alone the night before and getting his arm broken in three places; second, by arguing with Alec about it to the point of raised voices; and third, by getting sentenced to babysitting duty. Alexander had a tense conversation with Robert on the phone and succeeded in getting Max portalled in from L.A. and stuck to Jace, apparently to function as a sort of externalized sense of self-preservation.

“It’s heated.” The real estate agent, whose name he’s forgotten, is a tidy and pressed young woman whose dislike of Jace is growing with each place they view. He hasn’t made any of the appropriate sounds in appreciation of hardwood floors, original tiling, or updated appliances. “And it’s right this way.”

They emerge onto a patio, half of it glassed in. The pool flows beyond this greenhouse-style section and emerges defiant in the New York spring. Outside, it flows over a hidden edge for an infinity effect and melts an occasional snowflake. Magnus can only imagine what a nightmare the pigeons must make of this.

“Huh.” Max glances up from his textbook for the grand occasion. “I didn’t know mundanes had stuff this nice.”

“Of course they do. Even mundanes get bored.”

“Incorrigible and professionally diagnosed with superiority complexes,” Magnus amends, when the real estate agent edges yet closer to him. He’s enjoying his temporary status as the reasonable one. Originally, his jewelry and iridescent blouse had him at a disadvantage. Somewhere around Jace’s manifest inability to work a TV or explain a lease to Max, Magnus won.

“The perimeter’s a wash,” Jace announces, peering back the way they came. “Totally indefensible. That’s got to be over two hundred feet of floor-to-ceiling windows just in the living room.”

“On the _forty-third floor_ ,” says the agent, whose professional facade has slipped exponentially lower in the last half hour.

Jace snorts with open derision, opens his mouth, and remembers to whom he’s speaking. “But if something made it up,” he says, an even weaker finish given the strong start.

“Someone in a helicopter,” Magnus suggests brightly.

“You should get another look at the perimeter before you make up your mind,” Max says, eyes back on his book. “Just to be sure.”

“I don’t need—”

“Izzy would want you to.” Max, for no reason Magnus can discern, is slowly going red in the face.

Jace’s eyes narrow. “Fine.” He turns to the agent. “I’d like you to show me the apartment again.”

“All of it,” says Max.

“All of it,” Jace repeats.

The agent looks mournfully at Magnus. He shrugs. Whatever it is his brothers-in-law are doing, his best option is to remain minimally involved.

“Magnus, watch Max, would you?”

_Fantastic._

“If he tries to walk into the pool while he’s reading, let him.”

Magnus nods, with enough vertical range to do his neck an injury. “Fantastic!”

* * *

_Fantastic_ is not an accurate summary of Magnus’s feelings about babysitting Max for even a turn about a pool. Max makes him nervous in a room filled with other people, never mind alone. It is, at least, an indoor pool, forty-three stories up.

“...at which point the ship sank hundreds of fathoms to its watery grave, which is why I’ve been formally banned from the entire country.” Magnus knows, he _knows_ that being entertaining isn’t a guarantor of friendship; that it can in fact prove something akin to the opposite. But indulging the nervous tic of talking nonstop allows him to walk backward with both eyes on Max at all times, which will keep the number of comas resulting from this horrifying quarter hour to zero.

It also keeps Max engaged with steering for two. “Left,” he says, tugging Magnus’s sleeve. “Alec says you don’t know for sure why you got banned,” he adds, in something of a mumble.

Magnus had been under the impression Max wasn’t listening. He’s looked much more intent on his directorial role, the last few minutes. It reminds Magnus, with a rush of tenderness, of Alexander. Alec often appears to be focused entirely on a task of relatively greater importance, when in reality he never stopped listening whole-hearted to Magnus—or Izzy, or Jace, or on occasion Clary. “Alexander doesn’t know everything about me,” he says, loftily.

“Okay.” Max is deeply dubious, as if Alec probably does know everything, including more about Magnus than Magnus does.

“In fact, he doesn’t know any part of that story except the end result.”

“Okay.”

Magnus is certain again that Max hates him. Then they reach the door to the outer patio, and Max rushes to hold it for him, like a miniature gentleman. This puts him back at… certainly a previous square on the guessing game board.

Still standing against the door, increasingly stiff, Max says, “I have to tell you something.”

“Well, by all means.” Magnus throws in a grin and twirling sweep of the hand to lend pomp to the invitation, but they’re late and twitchy. “Say on.”

“Sorry I was so crappy to you at the party you threw for my rune ceremony.” He piles the words out in a heap and hustles away to look over the railing.

In such a heap, in fact, that Magnus genuinely doesn’t understand them, especially without context. “Come again?”

Max rests his chin on his folded arms, barely short of burying his face. “I’m _sorry._ That I was rude.”

“Oh, no, Max.” He puts his back to the rail, leaning into it, and tries to look relaxed while poised to grab Max if he spots a demon and tries to rappel down the building. “You were eleven years old! And you don’t owe me anything for a party I had to cancel halfway through because one of my old acquaintances made your entire family start hallucinating.”

“Yeah, that part sucked.” He picks at the stone until a grain comes loose under his fingers. “I meant before that. It was a great party, and I was rude on purpose. I was just mad at Mom and Dad. And I thought they’d stop fighting if you and Alec broke up. It was really dumb.”

Magnus sighs. “That isn’t dumb, Max. It’s an… emotionally fraught subject, and you reached an emotionally-driven conclusion. At eleven. I did much dumber things when I was eleven.”

Max shrugs, and droops like a houseplant on its second week without water.

“Inspired by the spirit of total honesty you’ve so bravely constructed about this swimming pool, I’m sorry too.” He wrinkles his nose. “You weren’t the only one thinking first and foremost about Maryse. That wasn’t exactly the amusement-heavy party I would have thrown for… oh, Madzie. You probably don’t care very much about flamenco dancers.”

“They were neat.” Max is as dubious of this as he was of Alec’s being factually incorrect. “The ice sculpture was cool,” he adds, with more warmth.

“I’m overjoyed to hear it.” Magnus considers the matter settled with at least a minimal appreciation of his talents as a host. Also, Max’s keenness on the subject of ice sculptures aside, it’s freezing out here. “Shall we go indoors?”

“So we’re okay now?” Max is suddenly a lot closer to his elbow.

“Of course we are! We were always okay, when were we not okay?” Enthusiasm comes naturally to Magnus. Attempting to play it up, however, makes it sound very much like he’s lying. He winces at himself. “Max. I never blamed you for anything you said, but if you want a formal reconciliation, you have it. I forgive you.”

Max brightens. “Cool. So now will you come with me to the party for Sophie Bridgestock’s rune ceremony?”

Magnus tries to blink this concept clear.

Max flushes. “Never mind. Izzy will.”

“No, wait, Max, I’d love to! I’m not entirely clear on what it is I’m agreeing to, but I agree to it!”

“Oh.” Max fiddles with his glasses. “Oh, okay. If you want.” The poorly-dissembled relief reminds Magnus sharply of Jace. “It won’t be as fancy as the one we had, but it’ll be fun."

A shadowhunter party filled with shadowhunter children and zero other downworlders sounds like the opposite of fun. However. As pre-teen rebellions go…

“I would be honored.” As pre-teen rebellions go, it isn’t going to put anyone in the hospital.

“ _Okay_.” Jace slams open the door to the patio. “Hope you got that settled, because I’m not looking at another walk-in closet. Clary and I could pool all our clothes and not fill one of these things.”

“Well then!” Magnus claps his hands. “That causes me terrible pain to hear, and to be perfectly frank you couldn’t have afforded a single one of the places we’ve looked at today even if you sold your soul, so why don’t I cut this short and introduce you to your new home?”

* * *

Magnus hits the living room at a run, eldritch flames in hand, and nearly skids into Alexander. Alec manages to catch him without touching the flames in question, and without impaling Magnus on the carving knife he’s commandeered as a weapon. There are perks to marrying into a family of obsessively trained derring-do types, as well.

“What are you guys doing?” Isabelle is startled into releasing her grip on the phone Jace is trying to wrestle from her.

“You screamed.” Alec finishes the motion he started when he grabbed his waist, sliding Magnus behind him. “What’s—oh, Iz, come on.” The cords of tension go out of his shoulders, and he lowers the perfectly good carving knife he was about to ruin. “What are you doing with Jace’s phone?”

“Shut up,” Jace hisses.

“He let me borrow it to look at some pictures of the balcony cats! And I didn’t scream. I might have shrieked. I was horrified.”

“Like you don’t text Simon—”

“Of course I sext Simon, I wasn’t horrified by the fact of sexy texting. I was horrified by ‘hey, you still up?’ with a winky face. Clary deserves better.”

“Izzy,” Alec snaps. “Stop reading Jace’s messages. Jace, stop letting her use your phone. You know she’s going to read your messages. And Izzy, stop being gross, that’s not even a sexy message.”

“I know, that’s the problem! I don’t think Jace even meant it to be a cliché, he just stumbled into it naturally,” Izzy says. “That’s what makes it even sadder.”

“No, he looked up ‘opening lines for late-night romance.” This is one aspect of pop culture Magnus had plenty of experience with, in recent memory. He’s had every single result for that search used on him.

“I hate,” Jace says, “all of you.” He turns and storms out of the apartment, Alec hard on his heels. Magnus is under the impression Alexander intends to handle the entire situation, until Jace makes to slam the door. Alec catches it, closes it gently, and turns back to Magnus and Izzy.

Magnus clenches a hand, extinguishing the flames still in his palm, which is never fun. It’s like trying to siphon water back into a faucet, to reverse a spell rather than use it.

Alexander, who’s aware of this, frowns. “What are you doing?”

“There are ladies present. I’ve been reliably informed that it’s a tad discomfiting when I set furniture on fire.”

“Wait, you do that?” Isabelle perks up to a degree Magnus suspects goes a way toward explaining some of Max’s behavioral issues. “It’s your house! Don’t let me stop you.”

“Well, I will… keep that in mind next time.”

“You,” Alec points at Izzy, “give Jace an hour to calm down, and then apologize.”

“It’s not my fault he writes shitty sexts!”

“Apologize for going through his messages, not for his shitty—I don’t want to discuss the quality of Jace’s—in fact, I don’t ever want to hear that word again.” He disappears into the kitchen.

Magnus takes a moment to appreciate the absolute conviction of Alexander’s hypocrisy. For a man who has sent Magnus some of the filthiest messages he’s ever received, Alec is genuinely horrified by the practice of putting a specific label on said messages. He moves on, however, in short order. A hop over the back of the couch puts him beside Izzy.

“It was an awful sext,” he agrees, sotto voce.

“It was! I’m looking out for the family honor. He could destroy everything we built together.” She shudders. “Imagine if Meliorn heard about this.”

“You’d never live it down.”

She places a hand against his arm and exerts some nominal pressure in what he assumes, touched and bemused, is a careful version of the shove she’d give Alec or Jace in his place. “You’d never live it down, Magnus _Lightwood_ -Bane.”

He feels his face crumple as if he’s tasted something foul, perhaps an early attempt at cooking from Alexander, or any attempt at cooking, at any point in time, from Isabelle.

“Here’s the thing, though.” She shifts closer, sliding an arm along the back of the couch. “It never has to get out, because there’s no reason for Jace to continue down this road when he has a wealth of resources available to him. I’m great at sexting. I’m an artist of the form. I can improve his whole deal.”

“I have every confidence in your abilities, but it seems to me you’re convincing the wrong person.”

She drops her head against her arm and blinks up at him, as if overcome by a fit of the vapors. “Jace won’t let me help if I _offer_. That’s where you come in.”

“Mm, I think you’ll find I don’t.” Magnus intends to leap to his feet, in order to express the depths of his disinterest through movement, but Izzy has played her cards cannily. She’s resting her arm against his shoulder, and he’s constitutionally incapable of jostling a beautiful woman in distress.

“Let him whine at you for a few minutes and work my name into the conversation, that’s it. He knows what he has to do, deep down.” She sighs heavily. “Alec never gives me this much trouble anymore, but Jace thinks he knows everything. It’s so much work to get him to admit he needs a little advice.”

Magnus regards her in silence for a moment, then lays his head down, the better to meet her eyes. “How much trouble does Max give you?”

“With his crush on the Bridgestock girl?”

“Did he talk to you about asking me to escort him to this party?”

Her eyes fly wide and she laughs. “You think I told him to do that?”

“He specifically mentioned you’d go with him if I said no.”

“I told him I wouldn’t ask you for him, but I would be a fallback as long as he manned up and asked you himself. I didn’t set you up, I know you’re going to hate it!” She grabs his wrist and squeezes. “Not that I’m going to get you out of it, either.” She swings his hand a little in time to a chant. “You don’t choose your family.”

“Hm. Well, I wouldn’t want to give Robert a heart attack by showing up on his remaining son’s arm unless I came by it honestly, that’s all.” He moves her hair behind her ear. “How are you doing?”

A week ago Izzy showed up at their door looking strained and wrung out as a cat fleeing a thunderstorm, and ensconced herself on the couch under an afghan. Magnus thought she was staving off a potential relapse or, given the way she kept clutching at her side, that perhaps she was having some feminine trouble. Until he overheard her mutter into Alec’s shoulder, _"How did you_ do _this when you moved out of the Institute? It feels like she took all the oxygen with her when she left."_

This was when he decided that, as much entertainment as it provided him to envision Jace slogging to work from some heathen hinterland like Staten Island, he was going to insist on the open apartment on the fourth floor of his own building.

It’s also the approximate date of the marked increase in hostilities in his loft. Jace and Izzy are both over constantly, a circumstance he could adjust to and enjoy, except that they’re also constantly at each other’s or Alec’s throat. The arguments are usually along the lines of the one they just had; nothing untoward for the way they’d harass one other on any given day, but with an edge that puts Magnus off-balance, and without time for one to blow over before the next has begun.

“Oh… I’m fine.” She pulls a face. “Alec says it’ll get easier, only it wasn’t very smart to do this while the rune’s new.” She cranes her neck, checking over the back of the couch. “I was wondering.” Her voice drops. “Have you talked to Alec about Camille?”

There’s pressure in his chest, as if one of his ribs has turned against him, healed wrong and pushing in. He smiles, a reflex, and feels it too late to stop it. “My dear, she’s a vampire. I find it works best not to invite her into our lives even in absentia.”

She studies him, hand still tight on his wrist. “Remember… um, Max’s party? When Alec—?”

It feels like stepping into empty air himself, just remembering it. “I do.”

“Did you talk to him about it, after?”

He frowns, looking past her. He can hear Alexander clattering around in the kitchen, faintly, and behind Isabelle there’s a pile of books stacked against the wall, all tomes that shouldn’t technically have left the Institute library but did, because Alec lives here, because Alec is fine. “Of course.”

“I didn’t. None of us did.” Her palm is still but her fingers trace up and down his arm as far as they can reach. “I know that’s not right, but we didn’t… know what to say, or…” She slides closer, eyes darting between his.

“That’s understandable.” Magnus knows what Alec is—sets out to be, deliberately—to his family. He’s dependable, before anything else. A foundation, a leaping-off point. For Alec to give way like that was horrifying to see, but to bring it up to him had been difficult even for Magnus. It had felt like heaping humiliation on hurt. “He wouldn’t want you to, Isabelle. It might be good for you two to discuss it, but—”

“Do you think we don’t care about him?”

Magnus had been under the impression he knew roughly where they were headed. “Excuse me?”

“You were the one who stopped him, and you were the one who talked to him about it. Do you think that means he doesn’t have anyone else?”

Magnus sits upright, crooking a knee between them. He remembers, now. _“Promise not to be mad at Simon.”_ “Oh,” he says. The pit of his stomach goes cold slowly, collecting icewater from his spine. “Oh, I… see.”

She winces, a little moue of apology. “Simon only told me because he was worried.”

“Isn’t that… kind of him. Inordinately, inappropriately kind. But I don’t see the cause. I’ve never been happier in my life, what on earth—”

“No, not that you’d hurt yourself, he was worried—we were worried—” She sits up too, pulling his hand into her lap. “I wanted to be a little drunk for this. I… So, Simon said… that _you_ said… that Camille stopped you because she was the only one who cared.”

Magnus’s bones feel hollow, magic careening where marrow should be and echoing off itself, reverberating. There’s nothing to do with it, nothing fair, much as he’d like to fix this with a spell. “I told Alexander about that. I don’t see that I owe you and Simon a report on it, but your concern is misplaced.”

“You told Alec that you almost hurt yourself, or you told him what Camille had to say about it?”

She’s dragging this out to ridiculous, zigzagging lengths, all of them off course. “The former. Obviously—”

“Magnus?” Alexander calls. “Hey, where’d you put all the whisks?”

Magnus extracts his hand from Isabelle’s and propels himself to his feet, suddenly very aware that Izzy is visibly upset and that he can’t look much better. “Back of the second drawer on the left!” If Alec comes in, the conversation Izzy wants him to have is going to happen right this second and with three parties rather than two. “I think I’ll have that chat with Jace after all,” he announces.

She stands too, casting a frantic look toward the kitchen. “I take it back, I’ll apologize to Jace. Shit, I’m sorry, this was really bad timing, I’m an idiot—”

“No, no, you… stay right there.” Magnus has a head start, and handily beats her to the door. “He’ll be begging you for a tutorial before dinner’s on the table.”

“Magnus.” Izzy has a hand on her necklace, not curled around it as she usually might but pressed flat as if she’s hiding it. Her face is drawn with the sort of determination in discomfort that makes Alexander so painful to argue with. “This is the second time since I brought her up that I’ve asked you to do something and you agreed the second I made you upset.”

“Isabelle—”

“Alec should know—”

“Isabelle,” Magnus says, in a very different tone than the one he started with. She flinches, which makes him sick but is a momentary advantage at best. He knows Izzy, and she’s startled, not intimidated. “I’d like you to drop this.”

“Dropping!” She holds her hands up. “Consider it dropped.”

“Permanently.”

Her hands fall to her elbows and her eyes, huge and luminous, go wider. “I can’t promise that while I’m worried about you.”

“I see. No, of course not. Why would I think that might be a reasonable request, given the subject matter is my personal history, a history from which you’ve gleaned a fragment secondhand, completely without context—”

“So I’m wrong. She’s ‘the only one who cared,’ that’s something you just came up with on your own, not something she said to you.”

This strikes him as a trick question. Under Isabelle’s gaze, neither answer sounds as reasonable as it tends to in his head.

“And it was the only time she said something like that,” Izzy presses. “It was a crazy one-off, not—”

“That’s enough,” Magnus says quietly. “I can’t stop you from bringing her up, but I’m not going to discuss her with you. I’m done.”

“With me,” Izzy says, barely faltering in her trajectory, “okay, I get it, but Alec—”

Magnus closes the door behind him.

* * *

There are benefits to Jace living down three flights of stairs. For one, if he’s in a snit and Magnus wants to find him, it’s much easier not to have to track him to some filthy alley between here and the Institute and provide backup against whatever demon he’s managed to find. Also, it feels less like turning tail and outright fleeing his sister-in-law, given he doesn’t even leave the building.

Jace is sitting in what might, notionally, be the living room. Currently the entire place is not only empty but dark, and Jace is sitting by an open window. It’s not quite the scene of domestic bliss Magnus had in mind for him and Clary. He comes by the open window respectably, at least; beside him Chairman Meow blinks up at Magnus.

Jace looks over, light from the street catching his face. Magnus watches his irritation knocked off course by surprise. It should be Alexander who rushes after him. At the outside, it should be Isabelle. The swell of impatience and resentment in his throat catches Magnus off guard. He hasn’t been jealous of Jace in ages, but this tastes the same on the back of his tongue. He pushes his shoulder against the doorframe in an attempt at nonchalance. “You’re making them worry.” This isn’t quite what he meant to say, and he starts over. “I mean—Alexander’s worried about you.”

It’s not what he meant to say, but it was honest—an accusation rather than the expression of concern he intended to frame it as. Jace is, perhaps unfortunately, good at recognizing honesty when he hears it. “I know what you meant.” He rolls to his feet, diffuse dissatisfaction pulled to the nearest fight like lightning to the tallest object. “Go ahead, say it.”

Magnus works two knuckles between his eyebrows. “All right, then. Jonathan Christopher, you’re giving me wrinkles before my time, and I’ll grant you my time is _never_ , but that’s all the more reason to show a little consideration.”

Jace folds his arms, although that may just be because he’s cold. The open window was well and good when it let the Chairman in, but he might have closed it behind him. “No one asked you to deal with this.”

“Alexander and Isabelle, in a display of absolutely decadent self-indulgence, are taking a few moments for themselves while you finish sulking. I thought I’d pick up some slack, since you don’t seem inclined to do so.”

Jace’s expression drains to the kind of poleaxed hurt Magnus has only seen precede a thorough lashing out, and he digs in to give as good as he gets even as he tells himself that this isn’t what he came here to accomplish.

And then, what Jace says is, “I owe you.”

Magnus pauses. He’s absolutely not speechless, per se, but it does take him a few seconds longer than usual to come up with the dazzling, “What?”

“I still owe you, just for helping me look, even if you hadn’t found this place. But, you know. You did. So what do you want?” He glances around the darkened room, as if some quest will present itself.

“Oh, I’m…” Magnus keeps his gaze on Jace through sheer force of will. It’s tempting to follow his example and hope inspiration is lurking on the blank walls. “I’m sure I’ll think of something.” He tries to sound mysterious and, out of respect for the argument he thought they were in the middle of, a bit sinister. Stammering likely killed as much of Jace’s trepidation as was left after cohabitation delivered its mortifying blows, but it pays to make an effort.

“So? Think of it.”

“Are you hoping I’ll ask you to slay me a dragon purely so it won’t be your fault when you come home with another broken arm, or do you generally want to get into dragonslaying?”

“You’re not going to.” Jace folds back down, resuming his place on the floor beside the cat, which studiously ignores him. “Or it’ll be something so small it’s dumb, like asking me to get you a drink. Or it’ll be something I’d have done anyway. You never really ask.”

Magnus, although he hasn’t been invited by the man of the house, takes a seat himself. He conjures himself a cushion first, as he doesn’t trust any floor Jace has walked on. “I’m sorry,” he says finally, “did you just accuse me of being undemanding?”

Jace shrugs. “Whatever you want to call it.”

“Well, this is certainly a novel experience. I should hope the attention I claim when I walk in a room would answer the charge—”

“You’re flashy, that’s not the same thing. Come on, you know I get it.”

Magnus pauses. This is Izzy’s fault, he thinks, how clearly he remembers Camille’s hand cold on the back of his neck. She’d said it so gently. She’d been very gentle about everything, in the aftermath. _“But we can agree it was a little dramatic, wasn’t it, sweetheart? If you’d really wanted to, I couldn’t have stopped you.”_

Magnus is sure it started as a dare, for Jace.

“All right then.” Magnus taps his fingers on the floor as if on piano keys and a skelter of sparks roll toward the Chairman, who bats at them crab-armed. “I promise to dream up some truly formidable task before the week is out, how about that?”

Drooping over his knees and poking the longest-lived spark, Jace looks awfully young.

“When Clary gets back,” Magnus tries, “don’t you think your welcome-home gift might dazzle her in direct inverse proportion to how many stories you have to tell her about your stays in the infirmary?”

“I know that.” He flicks the spark back Magnus’s way. “Izzy gave me the speech already, the ‘you can’t punish her for leaving by getting yourself hurt’ speech.”

“Oh. Well, excellent!” Magnus brushes his hands together. The Chairman heaves himself to his feet and makes a ponderous approach.

“I slipped up is all,” Jace mumbles. “I don’t know what else…”

The Chairman settles, spreading as he meets the floor, by Magnus’s knee. He blinks, eyes catching the light from outside and tossing it back hammered flat and red.

It would have started as a dare. Jace did risky things because he knew no one cared and he wanted them to admit it. Magnus is intimately acquainted with the practice of keeping up a habit that’s lost its use, and he’s aware that given enough time, the undead habit will stumble its way to a second life. Jace knows, as surely as he did before that no one cared, he _knows_ that Alec and Izzy and Clary love him. What started as a dare to admit they don’t is now a demand for proof they do.

Magnus nods, holding a breath and the urge to snap. _Each and every bad mood you’re in doesn’t need to become a group activity,_ for example, wouldn’t be a constructive response. “You might try talking to her,” he ventures. “Or to Alexander.”

Jace’s expression turns, clears. “Like you do?”

Magnus settles back, shifting his weight away. He picks grit and cobwebs out of the Chairman’s fur, piece by piece.

Camille had been gentle, after, and attentive. So much so, and for long enough, that it took on a certain pointedness. The closest she came to saying it was months later, an offhand _“If you absolutely need to be treated with kid gloves for a while, just ask me next time.”_ But it had helped—and she was right, or it wouldn’t have. The urge passed, and left him dizzy in its absence, because she was right. Right enough, anyway.

Jace almost startles him when he continues. “It’s not like he runs to me with every fight you guys have, but eventually I get a rough outline.” Magnus, on reflection, doesn’t care for Jace’s newfound relative depth of empathy. It’s made him rather more irritating than less. “You don’t go to him with anything, he has to pry it out of you.” Jace’s eyes narrow as he fits pieces together. “You know what? The only times you bring your shit up, you drop it so we have to listen to you about _our_ shit. You did it to Simon, and Clary, and Alec—”

“All right.” Magnus desperately wants not to discover exactly how many of his more upsetting life experiences have made it back to Jace by virtue of shared acquaintances, and in how much detail. _Simon and Clary, Jace and Izzy, Alec and Max_. The thing about a net, he thinks sourly, is that it shares. It communicates. Dip one knot in water and watch it leech its way up to the next three around it.

“I’m not trying to… whatever.” Jace brushes fur off his jeans. “I just think you could stand to ask instead of bury everything, once in a while.”

Magnus folds his hands on his knees, leaving the Chairman to groom himself in his own time. If he wants to walk around carrying the debris of some basement as a badge of exploration, who is Magnus to stop him? “And I think you could stand to ask rather than blow everything up, once in a while.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.” Magnus stands to stalk out of his second unsatisfactory conversation of the evening, and then hesitates. “Jace…”

“Yeah.” It’s short, verging on too loud.

Magnus would love to pick up on that subtle social cue and leave things where they lie, but a few seconds’ reflection have him second-guessing Jace’s spike in empathy. “This concern about the health of my interpersonal habits. Is it, by any remote chance, stemming from a conversation with Isabelle?”

Jace groans. “Give me a break, I have to go up there tomorrow and ask her for a sexting tutorial.”

“It would be impolitic to sell her out at the moment. I can see that.”

“I meant I don’t want to think about her right now. No, we don’t sit around talking about you—” He’s tipped his head far enough back that Magnus can see him reconsider some recent conversation, just enough for a twist of doubt to cross his face. But he says again, stronger, “No way. It’s not on Izzy.”

“I see. Thank you for answering me.” He says it a bit snidely, but then he’s only gotten his answer sidelong. He considers them even.


	3. Chapter 3

The next morning, Magnus wakes to an empty bed. He listens, one hand in the hollow Alexander’s carved in the mattress. His skin hums with the touch of his wards, a note he notices only because he’s paying attention. He hadn’t expected Alexander to be here, given the morning ahead of him at the Institute, and with the visit he’ll need to pay Jace first. After an entire night for Jace to traverse the ankle-twisting terrain of a good sulk, Alec will want to be there to pull him over the last few stones in his path.

He does smell coffee, which was thoughtful of Alec to have left, and it’d be a pity to let it go cold. Unless Isabelle left with her brother, she’ll need feeding, too. He levers himself up and takes the time to brush his teeth the old-fashioned way before he attempts any magic. He’d hate to accidentally turn his hair lime green again.

When he steps out—dressed and made up to face the day in black and gold—Izzy isn’t the one waiting for him. “Alexander,” he says, smile irrepressible. Alec is always a pleasure, but every now and then an unexpected one.

“Hey, you.” Alec bends, an answering smile and a kiss on his lips, and hands Magnus a mug. “Come on, you can drink it out here.”

“Oh, well, if that’s what the Head of the Institute thinks is best…”

“Don’t start with me, I have to go to work.” Alec is aggrieved and gratifyingly unconvincing. He turns to take Magnus’s face in his hands, spanning his jaw and dragging his fingers through his recently-arranged hair, and kisses him deeply enough to start an itch if not to scratch it. Briefly, the square-set air of determination is gone, but by Magnus’s next breath it’s back, and Alec has taken his hand and pulled him onto the balcony. He closes the door behind them and puts a hand on the lock, then pauses, watching Magnus.

Magnus shrugs and nods and swallows half his coffee in one gulp. Alec locks the door and faces him with the slightly breathless resolve that precedes a serious talk.

Magnus, throat closing, rifles back over last evening, trying to anticipate what exactly Izzy will have said to him about—

“Are they over too much?” Alec blurts.

Magnus blinks over the rim of his mug, too thrown to trust his own relief. “Are—who?”

Alexander closes his eyes briefly, shakes his head. “Sorry. Iz and Jace.” He braces a hand against the door. “I just locked us out of our own apartment to be sure we get a private conversation.” He puts his hand on Magnus’s hip and smiles, gaze clear now. All those nerves just to break that loose, but now that it’s in the open, he’s already calming.

“Alexander, of course your family is welcome in your—”

“Hey.” Alec tugs him closer by a belt loop. “You killed that spell halfway through last night. It’s 7 a.m. and you’re fully dressed. You’re not…” He narrows his eyes, searching Magnus’s face. “They don’t even register for me, but… You can’t be _off_ while they’re here, can you.” Magnus has his mouth open to object again as Alec continues, “How do you want to do this, pick some weekdays and I’ll tell them, I don’t know, not on Tuesday through Thursday? Not on weekends? Or more by ear?”

The road twists under Magnus’s feet. Alec isn’t calm because he knows Magnus will stop doing the wrong thing now that he’s pointed it out. He’s just relieved to have named the problem. The urge to take a concession and burn through it for every bit of warmth it can give is old. After this long with Alexander, Magnus had thought it was dead. He says, cautious, “No, I… It’s true I’m not as comfortable with them as you are. But I’d like to be, and I recognize that I have that opportunity with your family.”

“Our family.” Alec slides a hand around the back of his neck, using his thumb to turn Magnus’s face until he meets his gaze. “We don’t have to live with them on top of us, and you don’t have to pretend to be relaxed around them if you’re not, but you have to know they’re yours.”

Magnus hadn’t realized he was examining the tiles to the left of Alec’s shoulder until he lost the option. A shapeless irritation heaves, mostly with Isabelle, and some of it coils Alec’s way. _So Raphael is your family now,_ he wants to say, only it wouldn’t be fair, and thinking about Raphael at all makes him count backward every time— _if he lives to be eighty, if he lives to be ninety—_ He turns to set his mug aside, shaking off this train of thought. “Fine, our family. This is rare, for me. I do want it. But I…” He gropes for the words, sideways and back.

Alec takes his face in both hands and drags his grip to cover Magnus’s ears, not blocking sound but raising a faint seashell roar. “First thing that comes to mind. You want that, but—”

“I think I’m fighting with them.” Magnus winces. His baseline with Jace is too low to allow for specific arguments, as he takes it for granted they disagree about everything but Alec; and he hasn’t seriously differed with Isabelle on anything before.

Alexander smiles, a loosening of his entire face into relief, and slides his hands back down to Magnus’s waist, spanning the width of his back. “Oh, all right.”

“All right? I’ve managed to get into two different arguments with the people you love most in the world—”

“I love you most in the world too, and yeah, _all right_. Magnus, seriously? I spent a full day fighting with Jace. It was yesterday, remember?” He pulls Magnus close. “One time Izzy didn’t talk to me for a week. You don’t have to like them every second to get more comfortable with them than you are now.”

Magnus groans, dropping forward and dodging Alec’s eyes. He buries his face in Alec’s chest, and Alec lets him, folding him up. He’s never in his life felt as safe as he does right here, and it’s still novel, that security. “It’s just not how I’m used to doing things,” he says, muffled by the wool of Alec’s sweater. “Warlocks don’t fight with our friends. We check back in a decade or so to see whether they’ve forgotten the argument.” As soon as he says it, he knows it’s not quite right, but he lets it stand.

Alec hums, an acknowledgment that rumbles against his temple, but doesn’t point out that he and Izzy and Jace—Clary and Simon, Max, Luke, Maryse—don’t have a decade to toss at their problems.

In retrospect, Ragnor hadn’t either.

“So?” Alec prompts.

Magnus shivers in his embrace, and covers it by pulling back to face him again. “So, what?”

“So what are you fighting with Izzy and Jace about?”

“Oh no.” Magnus taps a finger against his lips. “You’re not negotiating this for me. I may have lowered myself to their level, after a fashion, but I will not be joining their ranks and letting you hand down judgments from on high.”

“Who said anything about judgment?” Alec is too ostentatiously wounded not to have been planning just that. “Can I hear my husband’s side of a family dispute, or is it secret?”

“Of course it’s not, Isabelle just—” He pauses. He could end this entire problem right now. There’s nothing preventing him. _“Give him a memory.”_ It might not be glowing, but he has it to hand. He could tell Alec that Camille had promised him he always had a home with her, and had kept her word. He could tell Alec how much that had meant to him over the years. Most memories can be good, trimmed in the right places. He’d have done exactly what Isabelle asked and there wouldn’t be anything to argue about.

The prospect drags his heart low in his chest, pushes his lungs into too small a space.

“I’d like a chance to resolve it for myself,” he says brightly. He hesitated too long first, and let too much of why onto his face. Alec, rather than reassured, looks less at ease. Magnus sighs. He can tell Alexander whatever he wants about Camille, and it won’t change how Alec feels. He knows that. He even thinks, vaguely, that Alec must know—he met Camille, he saw her at her most reckless and petty; he must know—but if Magnus says it. That will be different.

Alexander checks with Magnus before he locks a door, every single time. As far as he’s concerned, this is a sourceless quirk of Magnus’s. In fact, it could be polite in downworlder society generally, for all Alec cares. It’s something incidental about Magnus, not something that happened to Magnus.

“It’s nothing.” Magnus unreels it slowly enough to keep Alec from objecting. “It doesn’t feel like nothing, though. I need to sort it out a little.”

“All right.” Alec releases him, and then holds his elbows rather than step away. “I can wait.”

“Not for a decade,” Magnus promises.

“Not for a decade.” Alec studies him. “And I can tell Izzy to back off while you think, even if I don’t know what you’re thinking about.”

“I will make it worth your while to not intervene.” Magnus, denied access to his first preference by Alec’s grip on his arms, waggles his eyebrows instead.

“Bribery? That’s shocking behavior from the High Warlock.”

“If the Head of the Institute thinks that’s shocking, he might not want to see what I have planned for tonight.”

“You’re killing me.” He sounds genuinely agonized. “Fine. Can I call around lunch or are you going to be with a client?”

“Mm, depends how long it takes me to summon and banish—”

“I know you’re not breaking the Accords.”

“—tea for two. I’ll let you know.”

“Okay.” Alec almost steps away. “Which demon? Is it safe, or should I come home?”

“Just a cecaelia. If I were to summon one, it would be a safer endeavor than attempting the subway on a weekday morning.”

He nods. “I love you.”

“I love you, Alexander.”

* * *

Magnus is eight hundred years old, give or take four hundred; he’s a phenomenally powerful user of magic; he’s the High Warlock of Brooklyn; he’s personally saved the entire world at least once. Somehow, none of this gets him out of Moving Day.

“Alec!” Simon emerges from the bedroom, still nursing a finger he jammed between the couch and a doorframe. This was over an hour ago, and Magnus is positive vampires heal faster than that. “Jace isn’t buying us pizza.”

Alec looks up from the bookshelf he and Izzy are assembling. He looks up very slowly. Reluctantly, even. “Okay,” he says, also slowly.

“Okay,” Simon repeats. “You know what, it’s like being dropped on an alien planet and making first contact, every single time I have a conversation with you. I think that’s what keeps our relationship fresh and fun.”

Alec, visibly making first contact with the stress headache Simon gives him every single time he has a conversation with him, shakes his head. “Talk to Magnus about whatever this is. A list of things Jace… isn’t doing. Magnus?”

“It sounds more my speed,” Magnus agrees, beckoning. “I love to hear about Jace’s shortcomings. I’ll see if I can’t translate this into something actionable for Alexander.” He’s engaged with the task of making sure the couch Simon moved across town was worth the effort by taking up as much of it as is polite, given Max needs room to study on the far end.

“It’s what you _do_.” Simon takes a seat on the coffee table. Izzy recently assembled the table in question, so trusting it to take his weight is an act of bravery or foolishness or, Magnus supposes, love, which is to say both. “Your friends give up a weekend to function as a, you know, maybe kind of a shitty moving service, but a _free_ moving service, they spend untold hours performing intense physical labor for you. So what you do is, you buy them pizza and beer. It’s the bare minimum.”

“Or you let them finish the entire move in one majestic sweep of the hand, but I take your point. If he insists on doing things the hard, boring, interminable, sweaty way…” He twirls his fingers to get Alec’s attention. “Alexander, he’s making sense.”

“Yeah, I don’t care whose tradition it is, mundanes make sense sometimes.” Izzy pouts and wilts, the effect highlighted by the sledgehammer she’s twirling. “I’m hungry, and I don’t see why I should have to pay for my own food in the middle of doing Jace’s dirty work.”

“It’s not my dirty work. We’re doing this for _Clary_.” Jace glowers at them from the bedroom door. “When she gets back from Idris, it’ll all be set.” He glowers more specifically at Magnus, Simon, and Max. “Anyway, some of us aren’t doing any dirty work.”

“Big test coming up, let me finish this chapter,” says Max.

“I’m on strike until you buy pizza,” says Simon.

“I don’t see why a vampire and three Shadowhunters, all of you with preternatural strength, speed, and stamina, need me to lift heavy things. Consider me decorative.”

“Hey,” says Max.

“Three and a half Shadowhunters,” Magnus amends.

“ _You_ always have a test coming up, _you_ can’t even eat pizza, and fine. I’ll tell Clary all her friends pulled together to get her new place ready, except you.”

“Oh, is that what this is about? My dear, I have the means and the taste to buy her a real housewarming present. I don’t have to suffer in her name.”

“It’s a good gesture, Jace,” Alec says firmly. “We’re happy to help. Which Magnus has done plenty of. We’d never have gotten the couch or the mattress up the stairs without him, so back off.” Magnus basks in this appreciation, ill-gotten though it may be. He’d made enough of a production out of directing the heavy lifters to avoid any of them noticing that he was using more magic than math to get them around corners. Alec gives him an intensely fond but somewhat wry look, and Magnus reconsiders. He’d avoided almost any of them noticing. “And, I guess… buy Izzy a pizza?”

“I’ve been decorative _and_ helpful. I deserve a pizza.”

“Very both of those things,” Simon agrees. “I love a woman with a hammer.” The fruits of said hammer’s labor choose that moment to give way beneath him, or try to.

Magnus, who’s been waiting for this, repositions a few screws as surreptitiously as possible. There’s only so far under the radar a flash of light can fly, though, and he claps and leaps to his feet simultaneous with the event, rings clacking. “I’ll run and fetch us all pizza, how about that?” He’s not even going to use a portal. A walk sounds like just the thing, at the moment. Izzy and Jace both seem willing to pretend they’ve forgotten anything regrettable said in the last forty-eight hours, perfectly polite as Catarina fifteen-odd years after one of his little spats with her, but it hasn’t been fifteen years. Magnus clearly has yet to perfect the art of the mortal timescale.

“I’ll come.” Max stands so abruptly he drops his book, and his face floods red. “You’ll need help to carry it all,” he mumbles, scooping it back up and nudging it onto the table next to Simon. Magnus can only hope the screws withstand the additional weight. It’s not a small book.

“Oh, actually, I’ll—” Simon jerks upright with almost as much urgency as Max. “I’ve been—there’s something I want to talk to you about, maybe now—?”

Izzy says, “Max, I need you here. To help us with the bookcase.”

Max glares fit to duel his older brother, but sinks back to the couch under the combined weight of Izzy’s raised eyebrows and Simon’s openly pleading expression.

Mostly, Magnus would love to avoid this. He is, however, a little bit morbidly curious. He smiles at Simon, turned far enough away from Alexander that he won’t notice any sharp edge to the expression. “Well, I suppose two makes our foraging party complete enough.”

* * *

Magnus enjoys talking—he even enjoys, on occasion, holding forth—and Simon makes an excellent audience. The combination of intelligence and credulousness, the open-armed tumble into whatever story he’s hearing. He does function as an entire peanut gallery in one human form, but Magnus has had no end of fun in peanut galleries.

Today, on this particular walk, Magnus is not talking. Magnus is _withholding._ However Simon intends to start this conversation, he’s taking the most scenic route possible to get there. Magnus intends to starve this impulse out.

“We’re going with Rocco’s again, huh? Yeah, that’s fine. It’s close. I feel a little bad, I know Alec and Jace will keep working the whole time. Wind ’em up and… Do you get tired, living with him? I mean, I guess not, I guess you guys have matching energy levels. Your energy is a lot less, like, grim, though. You could probably assemble a bed frame without looking at it like it had let you down personally because it was missing a screw.”

“Hm,” says Magnus, who can’t answer that one way or the other based on experience. He’s never assembled a bed frame in his life. He has magic, and burly delivery men, for that kind of thing.

“So,” Simon appears to be absorbed in counting the money Jace gave him. “So how about that weather, am I right?”

“ _Simon_ ,” says Magnus, as nonresponses aren’t working fast enough.

“Oh God.” He stuffs the money deep into his pocket, curling into his coat. “You’re pissed, right? How pissed are you, exactly? Can you please not set a snake on me?”

“Try giving me a compelling reason not to,” Magnus advises.

“Ah…” Simon sounds deeply pained. “Here’s the—so, in terms of, you know, confidential conversations—sometimes, sure, a topic might be _fundamentally_ confidential, it might be _implicit_ when you… if you tell someone, man to man… but then what does confidential even mean, exactly, because if you don’t explicitly ask for privacy and you actually sound pretty casual about some concerning key components, and then the guy you told man to man has a girlfriend he trusts with his life and also with yours, can’t that man express his concern to his girlfriend? The letter of confidentiality may be broken but the spirit, Magnus, the spirit remains intact.”

Magnus turns midstride and holds a finger up. It is, he admits to himself, gratifying to see Simon freeze in the middle of a sidewalk on the basis of a raised pointer. “Excuse me,” he says. “Was that an apology?”

“I guess so? I—yeah, I’m… I’m sorry.” Simon gains confidence as he makes his way through the sentence, ending in a blaze of certainty. Then he adds, “I don’t think it was _wrong_ , in a greater-good sense, but I know it was like… shitty. So I’m sorry.”

“Was it?” Magnus settles in exactly where he’s standing, crossing his arms. It’s a feat, on a New York sidewalk, but most people considering a dirty look or a brushed shoulder take in the effect of Magnus’s couture and expression in time to change their minds. “Was it _like, shitty_ , Simon?”

He flaps his arms a little back and forth, still in his coat pockets. It gives him the brief appearance of bat wings. “Would you be mad if I told Izzy to help her with something, and she shrugged off the Camille part?”

“That’s completely beside the point!”

“So… no. You’re not mad I told her, because you don’t think it’s that big a deal. You’re just mad that we think it _is_ a big deal. I… that’s why I told her, man.”

“All right,” Magnus says, and turns, and walks away.

“Where are you even going?” Simon is jogging to keep up.

“I’m going to get pizza. You, on the other hand—” Magnus stops again, and throws a hand in one direction to cloak them from prying eyes as he throws the other toward Simon to tear a portal into the air. It burns off the magic boiling from marrow to blood, looking to get out. It doesn’t help. What he wants is to make this go away. Getting rid of Simon in this moment isn’t going to do that.

Simon, as if he’s plucked the thought from behind Magnus’s ear like a mundane magician with a penny, sidesteps the portal and says, “What is that gonna do? I’m not Raphael, you can’t avoid me for twenty years if I piss you off. We have a family dinner at Maryse’s on Sunday.”

What Magnus wants, in his magic, in the song his bones sing, is to eliminate the threat. But Simon’s not a threat. At worst, what he and Izzy are proposing is that Magnus take up ten minutes of Alexander’s time for something mildly unpleasant and probably redundant.

Magnus settles his shoulders and closes the portal with a crackle of displaced and displeased matter. “Not that it matters, because she’s _gone_ , but Alec knows about Camille. He’s had a front-row seat on at least one occasion.”

Simon clenches his hands together, bouncing in place with nerves, but he doesn’t do anything useful like agree and drop the subject. “I think he doesn’t know about Camille, is the thing, because I think you don’t…” In the time it takes Magnus to blink he’s standing much closer. His arms are folded low across his stomach, his gaze jittery. “You know what really—what still keeps me up at night? About her? I mean, um, figuratively. Literally I guess she just made me predisposed to being a night person.”

Magnus does know. He could answer. He doesn’t.

“Because the vampire thing kind of turned out okay for me, in the balance, but I—I can’t stop thinking—the Writ of Transmutation, that whole deal. I’d sign it again, it was worth it, it’s fine, but she didn’t give me a choice and then she got me to say she did, and that’s—that’s what’s on the record, is the version that works for her.”

Magnus takes Simon’s arm, holds it tight. He means it to be comforting, though it’s at least half force of habit that puts him in motion. What he wants is to lash out. His veins hiss with it. His magic is a tool of a certain shape, and he can use it any way he likes, but there will always be tasks to which it’s better suited.

Simon nods, as if he’s agreeing with something Magnus said. “But I guess that’s kind of how she operates.” He doesn’t look inclined to meet anyone’s eyes anytime soon, and then he does, before Magnus can avoid it. “I get it that she wasn’t always this bad, I believe you that sometimes she was good for you. But you gotta give me something too, man. I don’t think you understand how creepy it was to hear you talk like you were still reading off a script Camille gave you.”

Magnus jerks back, as if to shake off an attempt to keep him still. It’s silly. He’s the one holding Simon, and anyway it wouldn’t have done any good if Simon did take it into his head to hold on. Magnus could always cheat, get away with magic, but physically Simon is stronger.

“Like, _I’m the only one who cares_ , that’s an insane thing to tell you, plus it’s objectively wrong, I mean I didn’t meet Ragnor but—”

“No, you didn’t.” Magnus backs up another step. His blood thunders in his throat.

Simon stops. “Yeah. Yeah, no that—that was poor… poor taste.”

“Don’t bring Ragnor up to me to win an argument.”

Simon nods rapidly. “Yup. No, I will… not be doing that again.” He laughs, high and fast. “Your eyes are showing.”

“You’re fortunate your intestines aren’t showing,” Magnus snaps over the rush in his ears, and then he takes a deep breath and lets it out very slowly. “Simon.”

“Yeah. Mm-hm. Still here. All ears, which, for the record, if you gut me, sure I’ll survive, but I’ll also freak out and not pay attention to whatever you’re about to say.”

“I’m aware that I owe you and Isabelle—especially Isabelle—after what you did to get me back from Edom. But that doesn’t give you two the right—”

“What are you talking about? You don’t owe us anything, and this isn’t us looking to collect because we’re bored and think it’d make a fun story if you spilled all your deepest darkest secrets. Look, I know this is weird, and I’m sorry we’re messing it up, but… Camille doesn’t seem all that gone to me if you still believe her.”

Magnus stops, at a loss. Simon is wrong, of course he is. There are pieces that don’t fit, though, in the argument Magnus settled in his head the second Izzy brought it up the first time.

“Okay,” Simon says. “Okay, but never mind, no rush, don’t—like, freak out.”

“I’m not freaking out.”

“Right! Good, neither of us are, I’m sure not freaked out. Love getting the man I hope to one day call brother-in-law to threaten my internal organs, totally fine with it. Super great that you’ve saved my life and soul a couple times and I guess what I’ve done is make you completely miserable, cool. Want to go get pizza?”

"I think you can manage the pizza." Magnus opens another portal. This time, he steps through it himself.

* * *

There is a situation in which Jace fills Magnus with absolute, unadulterated relief, and he’s found that situation. So perhaps some good will come of this night yet. It’s a drastic change from the last three days, over which he’s been filled with raging irritation at the sight of him, and he embraces it.

“ _Jace_ ,” he says, grabbing his shoulder and latching on for the foreseeable future. “You’re looking well!”

Jace’s expression blanks into confusion. “Yeah, I look amazing. The same as when I left your apartment a half an hour ago. You didn’t seem all that impressed then.”

“The lighting is much more flattering here. I should look into addressing that issue in my loft.” He absolutely will not be lighting his loft anything like this medieval altar to fire hazards and violence-themed party games. He wouldn’t describe his mood leading up to Ms Bridgestock’s party as dread, per se, but it certainly wasn’t eager anticipation. He almost wished Izzy would speak her mind again in the interim just for the distraction, but she’s backed off the subject of Camille. Which has left Magnus to focus entirely on his wardrobe and the prospect of spending three hours in the Institute without Alec.

“I guess.” Jace flicks at his hair, brimming over with self-satisfaction. “Turns out, Max couldn’t ask me because he promised to let Sophie Bridgestock do it. And she only got first shot because Max stood up for her. I’m a hot commodity.”

“Congratulations on being the very favorite among deadly preteens.” He nods circumspectly at Ms Bridgestock, a girl in braids just shy of being pigtails. “She has her grandfather’s chin. Funny story, her grandfather once tried to cut my eyes out.” He scans the room once more.

Jace frowns. “Are you nervous? You’re here all the time.”

“I’m not concerned about being attacked by a lingering die-hard purist, I’m concerned about stopping that attack myself and embarrassing Max.”

“Magnus.” Jace frees his shoulder, but only to pat Magnus on the back in what he’s fairly certain is intended as a friendly gesture. “You’ve got to relax about impressing Max. Kids can smell blood in the water.”

“Stupendous. That’s wonderful to hear right now, thank you.”

“Look, if someone attacks you, I’ll handle it. I’m better than Alec at that stuff anyway,” it’s blithely said, and he continues without acknowledging Magnus’s objection, “and Max can get as mad as he wants at me, I don’t give a shit.” His face twists. “You hear how dumb that is? If Max gets mad at me for defending our brother-in-law from bodily harm?”

Magnus, braced for their disagreement to bubble back up, has been avoiding conversations with Jace on any topic more serious than whether he might see his way clear to closing the balcony door behind himself. This comparatively cheerful offer to play bodyguard makes that look like wasted effort. “It’s the _way_ we counter-attack I imagine might cause him some misgivings. It doesn’t look as if physical violence is out of order. It’s possible no one would even notice.” He tips his champagne flute toward the nearest game, which appears to have evolved from the piñata to fill a crueler ecological niche, one developed on a dystopian island of child soldiers. Which, he supposes, in a way… “Magic, on the other hand—”

“What magic?” Max pops in from behind them. “Magnus, no one even got Sophie an ice sculpture like I had. Can you make her one?”

“Don’t be a pest,” Jace says. “He’s not a free party-planning committee for everybody. Just us.”

“Oh, I think it’s patently obvious I had nothing to do with planning this event. It’s a little grim for my taste. I’d be delighted to lighten things up.” It’s more effort this way—he doesn’t have an ice sculpture in the shape of a rune lying around, so he can’t just summon it but has to create it from scratch. Or from water. He mentally apologizes to Alexander for the jump in the Institute’s utilities this month; he doesn’t see any particular point in pretending to be subtle about the act of materializing an ice sculpture in the middle of a shadowhunter party, so he errs on the side of grandeur.

“Hm,” he says, doubtfully, when he’s done.

“Whoa,” Max says.

“It’s gonna put us underwater when it melts,” Jace comments.

“It’s the only festive element in the room! It had to carry a lot of weight. And it’s not my fault the ceilings are so high. I had a great deal of space to fill.”

“Neat,” is Max’s fervent verdict. “Thanks, Magnus!” He runs off to share the news with Sophie when she removes her blindfold to see why the room has gone momentarily quiet and several degrees colder. Physically speaking this is due to the massive amount of ice now dominating the room; spiritually, it’s due to an act of recreational magic among the kind of people the Bridgestocks invite to a party. Magnus is suddenly very tired of the Institute.

“I know what I’d like you to do for me,” he announces, and drains his champagne. “I have a little place in the Keys. I want to take Alexander there for an uninterrupted stay.”

Jace frowns. “You want me to hold him hostage until he understands what a vacation is? Or, what, take over as Head while he’s gone?”

“Oh, my. No, darling, I’d like you to watch the cats while we’re away.”

“Sure, okay.” Jace is visibly weighing this against what he got out of the deal and counting himself as having come out well ahead.

“Full-time. I want you to feed them twice a day, make sure they have water, and on occasion keep them company.”

Looking rather less like he’s gotten away with something scott-free, Jace nods. “How much company?”

“At least an hour a day. And…” Magnus is enjoying this now. “And you have to let the Chairman sit on your lap if he wants to.”

Jace looks mournfully at his black jeans, which will show the orange and white fur Chairman Meow leaves in his wake to excellent advantage. “Fine.”

“Well, then! I think we’ve settled that. Consider yourself a very nearly debt-free man. I just have to complete the annual vacation negotiation talks with my husband and you’ll be free.”

“Or I could shove him through a portal without a phone, is all I’m saying. He’d never get back up the coast the mundane way, you’d be set.”

“Tempting, but I’ve found taking the long way around pays off with Alec.”

This time Max skids into Jace, though his gaze is fixed on Magnus. “Sophie Bridgestock wants to meet you,” he says, with the grave importance of a diplomat about to introduce the rulers of two great nations.

“I can think of nothing that would bring me more joy than a formal introduction to the lady of the hour.”

Max nods and takes off again. At least shadowhunter children are allowed to run indoors, Magnus thinks. He can only assume they graduate to stalking on their sweet sixteenth.

Sophie trails behind Max, who is puffed up nearly to the point of floating and ducks under Magnus’s arm in a showy, unconvincing version of his casual collision with Jace. “Sophie,” Max announces, “this is Magnus. He’s my brother-in-law. And High Warlock of Brooklyn. And Izzy says he’s the most powerful warlock in North America.”

“Oh, that was artful. I’d politely demur, but now I’d be gainsaying Isabelle and bringing shame to the family. So, as _the_ most powerful warlock, it’s a pleasure to meet you, Ms Bridgestock.” It’s tempting to spare them all the inevitable, but he elects to get it over with and sticks his hand out for her to shake.

She does stare a few seconds too long at his nails (purple) and his rings (various), but she also takes his hand. The Bridgestocks really have changed. At least minimally. At least this branch.

“It’s nice to meet you too,” she says, very stiffly, with a tense jerk of her head that suggests she might bow if her spine would allow it. She shoots Max an urgent look and he shrugs.

“Well, we don’t want to keep you kids—”

“Magnus,” Max says suddenly, “Sophie—I mean, we were wondering—how do you—your hair’s magic, right?”

Jace coughs. Magnus can’t fathom how Jace, who doesn’t know the first thing about magic, can possibly have picked up on Raphael’s attitude toward Magnus’s perfectly legitimate choices as to how exactly he uses his power. “Sterling genetics,” Magnus says, quelling an urge to let his glamour slip. “And, yes, a few time-saving spells here and there. You would not believe how long it takes the mundane way.”

“I would,” Max says dismissively. “I know how long Jace takes in the morning.” Max is currently Magnus’s second-favorite Lightwood sibling.

“But his hair stays the same color,” Sophie bursts out. “Mr. Bane,” she adds.

“Oh, the purple?” He touches one of the highlights. “Yes, that’s magic. Dye takes even longer than hair spray.” During his unfortunate stint as a near-mundane, he’d given the instructions on a bottle one look and given up.

“There is a mundane way, though,” Sophie presses. “If someone wanted. And couldn’t do magic.”

Sophie, even in a severe black dress that ought to conjure Wednesday Addams, manages to put off very Stepford Child vibes. Magnus has been reminding himself that this isn’t necessarily her fault, but has to admit he’s failed to accept it until this moment. If he pictures her with purple in her hair, she’s positively friendly. “You know,” he says, “I wasn’t sure of an appropriate gift for this occasion.” In a shower of sparks, he produces a box tied with a red bow. “So I’d like to thank you for clarifying matters.” He’s been going _very_ light on the transportation spells Alec has finally learned to call ‘shoplifting,’ and feels he’s earned this one. The salon around the corner will never know the difference.

Sophie’s face is still teetering on the edge of disbelieving glee when her father catches up.

“Jace!” Noah Bridgestock looks like every step closer to Magnus is doing him an injury. This might be the view Magnus would have on holy ground, watching a vampire do their level best to approach. “And…” He casts about. “Max!”

“And Magnus,” Magnus provides, when Noah proves unequal to the task.

Noah nods enthusiastically, as if Magnus has come up with an arcane bit of vocabulary he’d once learned but since forgotten. “It’s an honor to have you here.” His hand is hard on his daughter’s shoulder. “Quite enough of an honor. We couldn’t ask for more.” He presses her back a step.

“Excuse me?” Jace rolls his shoulders as he steps between the Bridgestocks and Magnus. “What is that supposed to mean?”

Magnus re-assesses the social acceptability of a brawl at this children’s party, now that he’s staring down the barrel of actually watching his brother-in-law punch a man in front of that man’s daughter. He doesn’t, however, make a move to stop it. He’d thought himself braced for this, but he always hopes it won’t happen.

“Fine,” Max says, clear and snide and sweet. He’s clamped tight to Magnus’s side. “You don’t have to accept it. I’ll explain to Alec, the Lightwoods offered you a present but you didn’t want it.” The lisp he hasn’t had in years is back, as is the ringing delivery he’d lost to teenage mumbling. Magnus is forcibly reminded that Max can be a frankly unpleasant child. From this vantage point, the quality has a certain charm.

Noah goes red in blotches. “I don’t see that the Head needs—”

“I want to know why you’d turn it down in the first place.” Jace steps forward again, encroaching on Noah’s space. “I want you to say it out loud.”

Sophie is coming up blotchy as well, which is less satisfying. “Dad,” she says, and then, “Never mind, Mr. Bane, I just wondered, I don’t really want to try it.”

Max’s shoulders slacken somewhat under Magnus’s arm, but his grip on Magnus’s waist goes tighter. “ _Lightwood_ -Bane,” he says. “You don’t have to use it. But you might want to accept it, because it’s from the family.”

Noah's smile is grotesque. He puts a hand out. Jace snatches the box from Magnus and slaps it against Noah’s chest. “You know what? Don’t touch him.”

“Jace…” Noah holds out another moment, but Jace and Max have been speaking loudly. Almost everyone in the room is staring by this point, and his family’s slip down the diplomatic ladder is only getting more public.

“Dad,” Sophie mumbles, and marks their retreat with a backward apologetic glance but nary a word more.

Max tucks Magnus’s hand into his elbow, almost the way Alec would—if a full three feet lower—but then he bows his head over it until all Magnus can see is unruly brown hair, and he fidgets with one of Magnus’s rings. “Sorry,” he says. “I wanted to make up for what happened last time. But I guess this isn’t a really great party for you either.”

“Well… I’m sorry Sophie Bridgestock came so close to experiencing the joy that only choice of hair color can bring, only to have it snatched away by social trauma.”

Max plucks at the ring. “That’s her dad’s fault. He’s an asshole.”

“You’ll get no argument from me.”

“She could use it if she wants to. If she lets him decide how she feels about stuff I don’t even like her as much as I thought I did.” He selects another ring to twist around Magnus’s finger.

Magnus sighs. “You know… Max. Your brother and I are trying to make some very big changes to some very old traditions. I don’t want…” He ruffles Max’s hair, just for the sudden and possibly fleeting ease. “I’d like you to get angry with Alec rather than me if we ruin your dating prospects,” he decides, and says aloud because he supposes Max is old enough to grapple with harsh truths.

Max laughs. It’s half-stifled, half-sneer—very much like Jace—but it’s the first time Magnus has gotten a laugh out of him. “Okay.”

“Hey.” Jace is vibrating with pent energy. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Are we going home?” Max is ready with immediacy born of growing up watching Alec and Izzy manage Jace’s moods.

“Hold on, Jace. We’re here for Max and Sophie, not Noah.”

“You’re here for me,” Max says, now with the unshakable confidence of growing up as Alec and Izzy’s other number-one priority. “And I want to go too.”

Magnus feels faintly suffocated by the inescapability of it. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to let this ruin the entire party for us. It’s only going to happen at the next one—”

“Yeah, no kidding. We always leave parties early because Jace is about to get in a fight.” His voice dips, sing-song. “You don’t choose your family.”

Jace is still bouncing on his toes, fingers twitching just short of fists. He grins and winks broadly at them both. “But like Robert says, you can get lucky.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I made it! Finally finished and posted in its entirety a new work, a mere two and a half years after my last one. Thanks so much for reading, commenting, kudosing... I'm back babey.

He goes to Catarina. The specter raised was Raphael, but these days he waits on an invitation. He remembers Raphael’s face, scored where the light dragged across it, and remembers knowing why they chose him to interrogate. And that was when Raphael was one of the most powerful men in New York. Magnus isn’t going to call undue attention to him now by showing up on his doorstep at all hours.

“Oh, no,” Cat says when she sees him. “What do you want?”

“That is a very rude way to greet a friend, particularly one who comes bearing gifts. You hear the way she treats me?” He looks to the nurse beside her for sympathy.

“It’s the gift that concerns me. ‘Dropping by to greet a friend’ coffee is in the twelve to sixteen ounce range. A coffee the size a toddler tells me you want something.”

“Only your sound council. And I’ll have you know this is worth every word; not only is it enormous, I told them to use every form of sugar at their disposal.”

Cat’s coworker, a kinder woman and with better taste, tells her to go ahead and take her break, “And tell your circle of oddly good-looking male friends it’s fine to stop by whenever they’d like.” Magnus is considering switching best friends.

There’s enough sun shouldering through the clouds that the hospital courtyard is tolerably warm, and they huddle beside one another on a bench while Magnus circumspectly calls up a little twister of real heat.

Catarina takes one sip of her coffee and sputters out a laughing, “That’s terrible! Did you really get them to put in every single syrup and sweetener?”

“You don’t have to drink it,” Magnus says, with great dignity.

“I’m still going to drink it, I don’t have a stamina rune and I do have a child at home who’s going to need three hours of entertainment before bed.”

“You know you can always send my beloved sweetpea over to our place. We have an abundance of adult supervision. Nominally adult. I suppose I wouldn’t leave her with Jace for more than five minutes.”

“Mmm.” Cat takes another drink, wincing. She doesn’t say it, that Alec-with-Magnus is one thing but a household of shadowhunters is another. “I’ll think about it. Not as a platitude, I actually will.” She hooks her ankle behind his. “What’s going on?”

He steals the coffee back and takes a sip. It tastes as though all the syrups have rallied behind a packet of Splenda and lent it their strength. “That… is revolting,” he says, by way of apology.

“Told you.” She lifts her toes, sharpening the angle and knocking his foot sideways. “This break is fifteen minutes long, tops. I would kill for you, but I’m not setting a bad example for the interns for you.”

He groans. “I don’t see why you can’t be more like me, and impress your underlings by being terribly late to everything. It gives them a glimpse of the lifestyle to which they may someday become accustomed. It’s inspirational.”

She swipes the coffee and leans back, considering him at length. “Do you want to come over tonight after Madzie’s asleep?”

She asks with concern, not impatience, but it spurs him into impatience with himself. Which at least pushes him off the ledge into asking, “Have I ever… maybe during a fight, have you ever needed something and I wasn’t around?”

Cat laughs, a single startled sound. “No!” The word is warped by incredulity.

He spins his fingers, and the currents of air in their little bubble wobble and rise. “I just… something Simon said is bothering me. I never _avoided Raphael for twenty years_ ,” he adds. “The dear boy’s not even one hundred years old, I’d have missed a quarter of his life.” He stares down at a chip of onyx set in one of his rings.

“No, you didn’t,” she says slowly. “But Ragnor shared a lot with Raphael.”

“Gossiped,” Magnus corrects automatically.

“Sure.” Her smile is there and gone in the corner of his eye. “You avoided Ragnor for twenty-four and a half years. I’m sure he complained about it to Raphael too. He had exact dates, I can tell you that much.”

“That’s not right,” Magnus begins, but then he places the twenty years in question.

Cat blows into the steam rising from her cup, reshaping it. It billows into shapes, cloud-edged daisies and frogs. “You’ve never ignored any of us when we ask for help,” she says. She pokes a frog and it hops once before dispersing. “Just when we try to help you.”

“I didn’t need it.” It’s an argument he has every so often with Ragnor. He knows his lines by heart. “I could turn this entire building upside down intact and keep it there while I decide whether or not to crush it. Nothing happened that I couldn’t have stopped.”

“Maybe.” Catarina has always stayed to the side where this is concerned. Ragnor was inextricably involved—close to Camille, and then, explosively, not—while Catarina remained at a diplomatic remove. From Camille, and from her aftermath. It occurs to Magnus how much effort went into this tactic when exhaustion drains her next words pale. “That’s not the point, Magnus. You can be in trouble without being in mortal peril.”

“I suppose, but only the boring kind. It doesn’t get interesting until there’s mortal peril involved.” His throat aches. He feels vaguely betrayed, because he’s always told himself that she stayed quiet so as not to upset Ragnor, that odds were decent she agreed with Magnus all along.

“I don’t want to fight any more than you do,” she sighs.

“Then don’t start with unfair accusations. I do accept help, you know that. You saved me from Iris.” He sets a warm breeze spinning around them, just to stretch himself out a little into the world. It whistles back, the kind of echoes that orient him in a space, give it depth. The thin flat plane he’d been restricted to when Cat had to save him, he doesn’t live there now.

“You’re welcome.” Catarina, a true lady, doesn’t point out that he didn’t ask for that, or accept it with any particular grace. “I’m going to make an observation, and you’re going to hate it.”

He supposes that’s what he came for. Now that Ragnor’s gone, Catarina is the only person with much perspective on his life. If he doesn’t trust his own impressions, it leaves her. And if she contradicts his impressions, he’s going to hate it. “All right,” he says. “I will… try to consider that it may be correct even if I don’t care for it.”

“You and Camille were no good at fighting each other.”

He laughs. It comes out unpleasant, a scoff he doesn’t recognize. “I said I would try, but that’s not remotely true.”

“You argued, I know that. But if it was serious, you just broke up. You would walk out, and wait, and then you’d go back when you were ready to do things her way. She made it easier to leave her than ask her to change anything.”

He lays his fingers carefully flat against his leg, and he takes several breaths before he says, “Camille didn’t… start that trend.”

“No, but she leaned the hell into it. Ragnor and I gave you shit, until we gave up, but she loved it. Now that I know a little more about where you were… literally, where you were coming from, I can see why Camille might have been a relief.”

His next breath sears his lungs, tastes of ash and iron. If this world is deep, if it’s resonant, then Edom was bottomless and deafening.

“It’s not going to work this time,” she says quietly. “Running out on me. Madzie’s too young. We’re not so different from mundanes while we’re growing up. If you disappear for ten years and waltz back in when she’s a teenager, you’re too late.”

“I couldn’t…” She puts a hand on his and squeezes tight. He stares fixedly at her fingers in his. Her magic pulses, hot enough almost to see. “I couldn’t tell you about him.”

“You weren’t supposed to, if you didn’t want to.” She pushes her thumb into his palm.

Open disagreements with his father were brief, because once begun they were spider-shroud close. Both of them were locked in until it was over; Asmodeus didn't believe in letting the sun go down on his anger. Magnus doesn’t recall taking any particular comfort in the way Camille’s interest in a given argument dwindled in direct proportion to how serious it became. But.

“I wasn’t even going to switch continents this time,” he adds. “I’m not _that_ angry.”

“Hey, you can’t, can you? We should have gotten you a husband with a day job and twelve too many siblings centuries ago. You’re stuck with me.”

“I am, however, absolutely appalled that you may have a point. And Alexander has two and a half siblings.”

She hums deep in her throat. “They sure make enough racket for thirteen.” Her fingers prickle blue under his, just where they’re touching. Even he can barely see it, looking right at them, but he feels it as a cascade of notes. “Ragnor whined about it for a hundred years after because he wanted you around, not because he noticed you were gone when he wanted something and you weren’t there to give it to him.”

“I _am_ delightful to be around,” he says, because he doesn’t know what else to do with that.

“Yeah.” She knocks his foot sideways. “You’re not much good at buying coffee, is my only complaint. I don’t know if Alec is a good influence on you, if this is what I get out of his anti-shoplifting campaign.”

“He is.” Magnus can’t quite stifle how earnest it is.

Cat holds out only a second before she gives him a broad smile. “Yeah, he is.”

* * *

Alexander is on the couch when Magnus gets home, reading, feet up and with a mug of tea beside him. “Look at this,” Magnus says, stepping over the coffee table. “What a stunningly handsome portrait of domestic bliss. I almost hate to ruin it, perhaps with debauchery.”

“Go ahead.” He flips the papers he’s holding over long enough for Magnus to see that they’re mission reports and tilts his head back for a kiss. “Debauch away.”

“Now it’s a portrait of overwork and I despise it. It’s terrible of you to persist in making it a handsome one, it’s too confusing.” He settles his knees on either side of Alec’s hips, wrinkling scattered official documents, and fastens a hand in Alec’s hair before he pauses. “Are we alone?”

Alec grins. “Jace is grocery shopping. Izzy’s working. Max is with Mom.”

“In _that_ case…” Magnus kisses him with a great deal more heat than he’s had a chance to indulge in the living room, lately.

Alec responds in kind, gripping Magnus’s thighs and pulling him closer, but breaks off to ask, not nearly dazed enough, “How was the party? Anything I need to know about before I go in tomorrow?”

“No,” says Magnus, who doesn’t feel it’s likely the water bill will be set on Alec’s desk the very next time he sits down, making it not strictly necessary information under the stated terms.

“I’m going to ask Jace, too.”

He groans. “I’m sure that by the time you get in tomorrow, they’ll have mopped up what remains of the ice sculpture.”

Alec laughs, breath heavy with honey and spice from the tea. “Good start. Anything else Jace is going to tell me when I ask him?”

“Noah Bridgestock is… a vast improvement on his father,” Magnus says carefully. And, more quickly, when Alec’s grip tightens, “Max has already defended the family honor, so let’s not make a diplomatic incident out of it.” He presses the furrow out of Alec’s brow. “Although I’d like to enter into evidence the last twelve times you’ve seen me handle snide comments all on my own and with panache.”

“It’s not about that, I know you can. I just don’t want you to, especially not from people you’re dealing with in the first place because of me.”

Magnus hardly hears him, because he already knew what Alec would say. He knew, and he believes it. With Alec he doesn’t have to choose between invincibility and helplessness. He trusts that. If he trusts it he should act like it. If he thinks Catarina is right, he should—

“Alexander,” he says abruptly, and then he stops.

Alec waits a few seconds. “Magnus?” He prompts, when it takes too long.

“I—hm. I’m sorry, I…” He traces the slope of Alec’s nose with his ring finger. “The people in the Institute. You’re responsible for their safety, even people like Noah Bridgestock.”

“I’m responsible for their actions,” Alec says instantly, “and the consequences of those actions.”

“But all other things being equal. If someone like Noah had… concerns about the damage I could do…”

“ _Hey_.” Alec catches his wrists, grip just this side of too tight. “What are you talking about? I don’t give a shit whether Noah Bridgestock or anyone like him has cooked up some paranoid fantasy, beyond shutting him down.”

Circling this and coming at it sidelong isn’t working. Magnus is fine with getting Noah Bridgestock in trouble—long may his assignment in rural Arizona last—but preferably for things he actually did. “This isn’t about Noah,” he confesses. “Or you, actually. It’s just that I’ve been with leaders before. People who had to deal with the complications inherent in dating me, given the level of damage I could theoretically inflict.”

Alec looked devastated halfway through this, but he’s swaying toward furious. “Theoretically, any shadowhunter in that building could inflict a hell of a lot of damage before we stopped them. So what? Magnus, how is this not about Noah?”

“It’s not. He was rude, but he wasn’t concerned about me going on a killing spree. This is about… I don’t like other people locking doors behind me.” The second it leaves his mouth he knows he can’t finish. _If you wanted to prove where your loyalties lie, if you wanted to prove that you could stop me if you had to, you might go to another warlock or to a demon. You might find a way to contain me. It wouldn’t have to last long, or do any harm._ He’ll never get it out of his mouth.

“Hey.” Alexander drops his hands to Magnus’s hips and tugs him closer. “I’ll be better about it. If I slipped up, it wasn’t on purpose.”

He’s urgent, cautious. He sounds like Simon had when he finally backtracked from the subject of Camille. Magnus’s skin crawls to have elicited that tone twice in a week, but it’s a distant sensation because foremost is the suffocating sense of not wanting to continue when he has to. He’s started, and now he has to finish, and from here on out any stalling just wastes more time. “No,” he says, “it’s not that. You’re very considerate, darling. It’s more an issue of… I haven’t always felt that way.” _Because it didn’t last long or do any harm, I’d forgive you. You could tell me it was silly even to have felt betrayed, when nothing happened, when you hardly did anything at all, and I’d forgive you so fast it would make me sick remembering it seventy years later._ This is the part Alec should know.

Alec’s eyebrows lift, and his thumbs slide over the silk of Magnus’s shirt, back and forth. “So this isn’t about Noah. Is it about whatever’s got Izzy worked up?”

“I did say I wouldn’t make you wait a decade.” He smiles, feels it evaporate on contact.

“Yeah.” Alec hesitates. “I want to hear this. Clearly. It bothers me how much I don’t know about you, I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t, but Izzy…” He tugs on Magnus’s shirt. “I’ve known I was gay since I was maybe twelve, and she spent twelve years after that trying to trick me into saying it like the problem was I just hadn’t noticed yet. Sometimes her help comes on a little strong.” His fingers trace higher, spanning Magnus’s back and shoulder blades, leaving a trail of lit nerve endings in their wake. “We don’t have to talk about this before you’re ready.”

The relief is sudden, and sharp enough to hurt as it lashes back around: he shouldn’t be relieved. It’s childish, cowardly, to delay and pretend this will be easier later when it won’t.

But it’s not easy now, either, and Alec is willing to wait. Magnus aches in his throat, his chest, behind his eyes. He nods, and manages, “Later, then,” before he kisses Alexander, to buy himself a second and because Alexander is, always, very kissable. “We started this conversation on a much more promising note,” he adds into the hollow behind Alec’s ear. “Something about no one else being in the apartment?”

Alec’s arms are solid around his waist, and for him too there’s a second of lag, but then he laughs and surges forward, managing to stand and take Magnus with him. “We’re still moving to the bedroom. Bet you anything if we start out here one of them drops by.”

He fastens his hands behind Alec’s neck. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you it’s dangerous to make bets with the great and terrible Magnus Bane?”

“No one else brings it up quite as much as the great and terrible Magnus Bane does.” He hitches Magnus up, tightening his grip under his thighs and beaming with self-satisfaction when Magnus laughs and grabs his shoulders. “Too late, anyway. I forfeit, go ahead and collect.”

* * *

Clary isn’t due back from Idris for another five days, which makes it an especial treat when she bursts through the portal and into his arms.

“Biscuit!” Magnus catches and spins her. This may well qualify as disorderly conduct, in the Institute, but it will do these poor souls nothing but good to see a little honest emotion openly expressed. He may rate his friendships on a rather longer scale, one in which not seeing someone for a week doesn’t even qualify as long enough to miss them, but aside from enjoying Clary’s company he has pragmatic reasons to be overjoyed at a visit. In fact, he’s considering installing a portal permanently, between his loft and her person, so that he can always count on her intervention when Izzy and Jace get to be a bit much.

(This wouldn’t work. It’s impossible. Currently. Portals were also impossible, full stop, at one point. He makes a mental note to explore the option.)

“Oh my gosh, did I ever need a break.” She goes dramatically limp in his embrace. “It’s so stuffy there. I can’t believe I ever thought the New York Institute was _stuffy_! Everyone here is hip and fun-loving compared to Alicante. They think just because their city is unrealistically beautiful none of them need a personality. After we get this place out of the Middle Ages we need to work on Idris, it’s dire.”

“I imagine it’s true that they’re stuffy. However, I’d like to suggest that your less than stellar impression could have something to do with the fact that they tried to execute you.”

“They tried to execute me because they’re stuffy! They officially let downworlders in now, you need to come visit me and you’ll see.”

“That… sounds…”

“Excruciating?” She drags out the syllables, laughing as she settles under his arm and pulls him toward the exit. “Well, I think you and Alec should celebrate your next anniversary there. It’s the only way to top breaking up his wedding in the Institute and then getting married here.”

“We’ll turn that option over on our exotic Florida vacation, as we float about the shores near my house on my very fine boat.”

Clary cackles, pinching his side. “You have a house in Florida? You’re taking Alec there to get away from the cold, aren’t you! You really are eight thousand years old.”

“So I keep telling you,” Magnus says, with all the dignity possible under the circumstances.

“Well, don’t dye your hair blue for at least a year after Simon finds out about this. He’ll be unrelenting.”

“I wonder what that would be like.” They’re off Institute grounds now, and he can portal them back to the loft without so much as filling out a form.

Clary stays snug against his side. “Can you take us back… outside the apartment?” She checks her phone. “I’m supposed to buy them another couple minutes.”

“Ah! I thought it was strange Alexander asked me to get you, with Izzy and Jace available. Your little friends have been absolutely unravelling without you.”

She shoots him a look, sideways and clear in the way she sometimes is. He admires this, the occasional cut crystal of her insight even if she wields it as something of a blunt instrument. He doesn’t want it aimed at him, just now. All she says is, “Are they bugging you?”

“They’re none of them at their absolute best without you around.” He congratulates himself on the diplomacy of this response.

Clary scrunches her face. “I’ve been getting the weirdest feedback from Izzy,” she says, rubbing her hip. “I wasn’t sure what she was so stressed about until today.”

He nods, resigned at this point to his fate, and opens a portal to the hallway outside his apartment. “Until I gave it away.”

“No, she did.” Clary follows him through easily. He thinks wistfully of the days when going through a portal might distract her for a few seconds, but she continues speaking without so much as missing a beat. “When she called me to invite me back.”

“I see. Then can I perhaps anticipate your contribution—”

“I’m not saying a _word_. Izzy didn’t give me details and I’m not asking, I know she and Simon are a lot with Jace as backup. I’m minding my own business.”

“Thank you, Clarissa. That is astonishingly respectful and mature of you, given it flies in the very face of your innate curiosity and can-do attitude.”

“I think so too.” She’s high-pitched with effort.

Magnus waits. He withholds. Clary doesn’t even last as long as Simon did.

“I do want to make one tiny point. It’ll be so quick, you can pretend I never said anything.”

“Would that that were true.”

“You put a lot of work into not being a burden.” She stops, one hand on his elbow and the other on the door to the loft. “You know Alec. He doesn’t want that from anyone, least of all you. You should give him some weight to hold or he’ll go nuts.” She lets that hit but doesn’t wait for it to sink in before she smiles crookedly and pushes the door open. “Surprise,” she adds.

“Hey, you.” Alexander is waiting by the door and flanked by Izzy and Simon, which is cause for mild concern. He also has flour on his shirt, which is cause for more concern. His cooking is improving by leaps and bounds, but his baking is a more hazardous proposition. “So—we should have asked—I should have talked to you about this, but Izzy—”

“Happy unbirthday!” Simon, with a great deal more satisfaction than the achievement calls for, blows a party horn. “Hey, Clary!”

“ _What_ did I say?” Alec snatches the paper horn and crumples it up, which at least explains Simon’s triumph at having smuggled in and used the contraband. “Magnus—”

“I thought we agreed no noisemakers.” Luke emerges from the kitchen with a mixing bowl in hand, which worsens Magnus’s confusion but does relieve his growing anxiety about what he’ll be expected to eat. “Magnus, good to see you. Happy birthday.” He holds out his free arm for Clary, who barrels into him.

“Well, thank you, and it’s always a pleasure, Lucian, but it’s not—”

“Unbirthday,” Izzy corrects, with a besotted little wink at Simon.

Alec, with the air of a man whose every breath is benighted by an increase of the weight on his shoulders, mutters, “I told her you don’t remember when your birthday is and she said that was perfect, we could have the party even sooner.”

Simon reaches slowly for an inner pocket on his button-down. “And then Alec brought his impressive talent for buzzkilling to bear, and did his best to drain every drop of joy and spontaneity from the occasion—”

“I told them you don’t like surprises and it was rude to have seven people over without telling you first.” Alec has perfected the art of interrupting Simon by speaking through his teeth and without moving his lips.

“—but we managed to slip a few touches in here and there.” Simon produces another noisemaker and almost gets it to his lips before Alec grabs it.

“Simon, go out on the balcony so I can finish explaining the situation to my husband without comedic sound effects, please.”

“Seriously?”

“How many of these do you have? If it’s three or more, then yes, I’m serious.”

“Oh, baby, I’ll go with you.” Izzy blows Magnus a kiss, squeezes Clary’s hand, and hurries Simon away as he protests about his god-given right to be frisked rather than ejected.

Alec lets the door close behind them before he tries again, though he also whittles it down to the bare essentials and says them quickly, as if braced for more interruptions: “Izzy demanded we throw you a family party.”

“Maryse and Luke are making the cake,” Jace adds from the doorway. “Max claims he’s helping. I made the mimosas. Apparently I went a little heavy on the champagne.” He greets Clary with an uncomfortably heated kiss, especially given she’s still practically in Luke’s arms.

“For Pete’s sake. Rearrange the laws of the universe a couple times and these kids…” Luke retreats to the kitchen.

“Excuse us.” Alec is theoretically addressing Jace and Clary, who are absolutely not listening. He takes Magnus’s arms, lifts him backward into the study, and closes the door behind them. There’s been a silencing spell sealing this room off for months, and the noise cuts out as if he’s killed the power on a radio. He tips his head back against the door and closes his eyes.

“Darling…” Magnus sinks forward, wrapping his arms around Alec’s waist. “I admit this threw me off, and I do want a formal headcount. But I think it’s a very sweet gesture, and you know I love a festive gathering. Also, I love celebrating myself.”

“Mm-hm.” Alec slides a hand up the back of his neck and into his hair.

“That said, would you like me to claim this isn’t a good day for me before you do something you regret?”

“No,” he groans, thumb stroking idly behind Magnus’s ear. “This is… I love celebrating you too, you egomaniac. And I love everyone out there.”

“But?”

Alec shakes his head, eyes wide now but fixed on the ceiling. “There’s a lot of them.”

Magnus laughs, leaning in to kiss his jaw. “Did you not notice you have a lot of family? I certainly knew what I was marrying into.”

“They’re not usually all in one place.” He still looks a bit shocked.

“Imagine when you and Izzy relent and your father and his inamorata are invited to the next one.”

His expression crumples in horror.

“Well, I beg your pardon. Maybe just Robert.”

Alec groans and curls over him, dropping his face onto Magnus’s shoulder.

“See, seven’s not so bad. It could be nine. Is she much younger, Robert’s new squeeze?”

“I’m begging you to stop.”

“I’m only trying to be helpful, Alexander. Do you feel ready to face seven?”

Alec manages to drag a single syllable out into the space of a much longer word. “Yes.”

“There’s the fearless warrior I married. I’ll even go retrieve Isabelle and Simon for you, how about that? If I get Simon to explain that film series with the elves, we might not be back in for half an hour.”

“Don’t leave me with Mom that long, she’s too drunk.” Alec drags himself upright to give Magnus a very belated good morning kiss. “But yeah, if you dangle something shiny in front of Simon for a second, I’ll bring you a mimosa. A normal one.”

* * *

Magnus steps onto the terrace and Izzy, who has clearly had one of Jace’s infamous mimosas, throws her arms around him and settles there like she means to stay. “Look who we found!”

Chairman Meow winds his way out from between Simon’s ankles and trots over to give his chin a rub against Magnus’s boots.

“So you did.” He takes her hand and holds it out wide, swaying her slightly as if they’re dancing, though he can’t move his feet without inconveniencing His Comradeship. “Thank you very much for this doubtless magnificent event you put together in my honor.”

Her eyes widen, face the very picture of stricken innocence, as if he’s already accused her of something underhanded. “But…?”

“But what’s the occasion?”

She loops her free hand over his shoulder and presses, one finger at a time in a scattered rhythm back and forth, like she’s playing the piano. “Truce?” she says.

“Isabelle—”

“You don’t have to talk about Camille.” Simon scuffs at the gap between two tiles, loose mortar turning under his shoe. “I mean, not in a permission-y way, we’re not pretending we had you totally strategically vanquished and now we’re backing off, I’m just acknowledging a fact. We know you don’t have to.”

“The party is a promise,” Izzy agrees. “Our half of a promise. We won’t bring it up again.” She laces both her hands on his shoulder, hanging on until he catches her weight and pulls her around for a hug. “You don’t choose your family,” she says in his ear, “and you can’t opt out. We’re just here together, okay? For good.”

Magnus nods, suspended somewhere above belief. He knows she means it, but people do, when they say it. And then circumstances change.

She leans back, just enough to take his face in her hands. “I’m going to be less persistent about it, though. I just want you to know you never have only one person. We all love you. You can go to anyone in there if you need something.”

He puts a hand on her wrist, thumb over the vein, and it thrums.

“Well, maybe not Max,” Simon adds. “Like, he loves you, he’d be jazzed, but he might not be super helpful.”

Magnus laughs, half just because he’s grateful for the distraction, but it helps.

Izzy kisses his cheek. “We pushed too hard. I get it. I still want to make a deal.”

“Which deal is that?”

“Here!” Simon reaches into his pocket, and for a moment Magnus very seriously thinks he’s going to blow another noisemaker. What he hands over is a piece of paper, heavy and smooth. Izzy steers their joined hands over to accept it.

_The Lightwood Family Requests Your Presence at the Unbirthday Party for Magnus Lightwood-Bane…_

Magnus’s eyes blur only briefly. He throws parties all the time, but he can’t remember the last time someone threw one for him.

“There’s a price of admission,” Izzy says, mock-stern, just before her face tightens into seriousness. “Think about it. Don’t let us ruin the whole premise. Just seriously consider telling someone about her so you can get a reality check on the stuff she said to you.”

He’d like to say that he will, that he has, that he’s trying. He’d also like to explain why Izzy’s insistence hasn’t played particularly well with his instincts. He settles for nodding. He has time for all of that.

“My turn,” Simon announces. “I want a hug at least that long.”

Before Magnus can work out to whom that was addressed, Alec rattles the door open. He has an imprint on his chest which looks very much like someone Clary’s height got into the flour and then flung herself into his arms. “Izzy,” he says, “Clary wants you in there.”

“So Clary wants you to do something and now I have to do it.”

“Clary’s insisting on fitting thousands of candles on the cake because of some crack Magnus made about the Dead Sea, so yes, you have to handle that before Mom lets her because Luke thinks it’s funny.” He glares at Magnus. “You’re not allowed to use that line around her anymore.”

“Fine… Simon!” She squeezes Magnus’s hand one last time and draws Simon away in her wake with a regal wave. She also shoots him a look stone-heavy with portent and indicates Alec with widened eyes and expressive brows.

“What was that? Is she still on you about whatever this thing is? I don’t care, I’m going to tell her to cut it out.” Alec is still in the doorway, but when Magnus doesn’t answer quickly enough he steps out. The peevishness of his expression drains, softening his features, and he snaps his shirt to shake some flour out. “Magnus?”

“Your sister is doing her level best to make me take up scrapbooking.” Magnus brandishes the invitation.

Alec’s brow lowers, and he brushes a thumb across Magnus’s cheek. “Were you crying?”

“It’s just such a tacky hobby.”

“Magnus…”

“Alexander.” He’s worrying at his other fingers with his thumb, and Alec catches his hands. “When I tried to tell you about my problem with locks, the other day.”

Alec stills, face and body both, the kind of motionlessness that’s all poise for the next action.

“I’m not about to right this second,” he clarifies, “aside from the fact that it’s atrocious timing and I wouldn’t want to keep my celebrants waiting, I’m not… quite ready. But I would like to thank you for being willing to wait.”

Alec overbalances, offense to defense, moving closer and putting himself between Magnus and the world. “Of course I’ll wait. As long as you need.”

“And that’s new, for me. In other relationships, the kind of interest you and your family take in my little problems…” He laces his fingers together behind Alec’s neck. “I know that you’re interested because you care about me. But in my experience… You want to think that being known, being understood, means being loved. And it doesn’t. Someone can understand you completely without it meaning more to them than any other form of entertainment.”

Alec is quiet for a second, strategizing. “Okay,” he says finally. “I can’t help but fill in some blanks here, because by implication I’ve got the broad outlines of a couple incidents, and I know one of your exes.”

Magnus nods. This is a relief too, ill-gotten though it is. He should be able to articulate this, and broad outlines aren’t fair. If it’s still shaping who he is in his relationship with Alexander, then Alexander deserves a fuller perspective. But this is so much easier. “I don’t want to have to worry about her,” he adds quickly. “In any sense of the word.”

“I’m not going to pay any visits to the Gard,” Alec agrees. If his tone is more one of concession than foregone conclusion, Magnus can live with that.

The door whips open and Luke peers out, a dollop of frosting on his nose. “Sorry to interrupt.” He is roundly unapologetic. “Magnus, I need backup in there. Some newcomer solidarity. No offense, Alec, but your little brother is an unholy terror.”

“Oh, I’ll handle him,” Magnus announces airily. “Max just adores me.”

“He does,” Alec sighs. “He won’t stop talking about how his date was the only one at that party who was wearing any colors.”

“Of course he won’t. He’s a sensible child.” It does make sense. Magnus is very colorful, and Max probably doesn’t know anyone else who had professionally hunted pirates, even for a career a few hours long.

“I can see that going to your head.” Alec bends and scoops up the Chairman, who settles against his chest with only a faintly disgruntled attitude. “Party of eight?” He swipes cobwebs off his ears. “Shouldn’t we take him to a veterinarian at some point? Cats need check ups or something, right?”

Magnus leans in to kiss him, very briefly when the proximity of two entire people makes Chairman Meow give him a halfhearted warning swipe. “You continue to astonish me, Alexander. Unfortunately for you, I’m now going to hold you to that. I want you to walk into a mundane veterinary clinic holding that monster, and then fill out paperwork for him.”

Alec nods, resigned. “I’m good at filling out paperwork.”

“You _could_ get out of it if I ask Jace to take him while we’re in the Keys.”

Alec continues to nod, determined if uncomprehending. “Sure. Is that a warlock thing, like the Spiral Labyrinth? What do I need to do?”

“Too late, you agreed.” Magnus goes on tiptoe to land a kiss on Alec’s nose, then follows Luke inside posthaste. “That’s a verbal contract, darling, it’s binding.”

“Magnus? What kind of Keys?”

Simon looks up from his discreet mug, already grinning, which is not discreet of him. His teeth are absolutely smeared red. “The _Keys_?” he repeats, delighted. “Magnus. Magnus, are you going to Florida? _Please_ dye your hair blue. Let me have this one thing, I just want a picture of you on vacation in Florida as a bluehair. One picture. I’ll never tell a soul, I’ll make fun of you strictly to your face.”

“I was right.” Jace, finally, hands Magnus the mimosa he should’ve been given fifteen minutes ago. “You should have shut up about it and let me shove Alec through a portal.”

“I don’t know.” He looks over the room, bursting with people who’ve made an absolute mess of the way he’s accustomed to living his life. “I’m finding value in the long way around myself.”

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed, and comment should it strike your fancy! Or say hi on tumblr, where this now has [a post](https://adirotynd.tumblr.com/post/619671832998658048).


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